Just then Jesus met them and said, “Good morning!” They came up, took hold of His feet, and worshiped Him. —Matthew 28:9 “Can you play another one?” I asked Lori. We were driving, and she was sharing voice mails she had recovered from an old cell phone. I was surprised by voice of a friend who had recently …
You’ll see them on Kentucky Highway 88, a few miles east of Monroe, not far from Hawg Daddy’s Barbeque. They’ll be on your left, if you’re traveling west, towards Greensburg. But you’d better look quick, or you’ll miss them. Two chimneys, the stark remains of what was once a farm house, are sticking up from …
Mark Driscoll, formerly Pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, said of the enormously popular book, The Shack, “If you haven’t read The Shack, don’t.” Such is the consensus of many Christian leaders regarding William P. Young’s book, now a hot item on the silver screen. I haven’t read the book, but I did …
I was averaging 3-4 funerals a page in the dated church directories, loaned to me by a friend who loves our church’s history. “There’s one, and there’s another,” I commented to Lori. “I remember him, and her, too—that sweet couple. I officiated his funeral, then hers,” I periodically observed as Lori and I thumbed through …
Struggling for words, Frances appeared puzzled. Speaking to herself as much as to me, she whispered: “I just can’t remember where I fell.” Then turning her face to me and furrowing her brow, she demanded, “Dr. Whitlock, can you tell me where I fell?” She had not been out of the long-term care facility for at least a year. “You had to have fallen here, Ms. Frances,” I tried to console her. “If I only knew where I fell,” she said, still hoping, I suppose, that her pastor would somehow have the answer, because pastors should know those sorts of things, you know. It’s true that sometimes bad things happen to us because we are in the wrong. If I repeatedly run traffic lights, it is likely that the accident, and my possible injuries, would be my fault. Sometimes we are the ones to blame for our pain. At the same time, the people I crash into would be innocent. Something bad (the wreck) happened to them because of me. When we can trace our tragedy to some cause and effect, like that, we feel somewhat relieved, at least in relation to the why of the matter, though the pain and mystery can still weigh heavily there as well. “She was killed by a drunk driver,” for example, may answer the immediate question, “why?” A man was over the legal limit and drove irresponsibly. But that doesn’t address the deeper questions: “Why our daughter? Why then? Why, at all?” Then there are times when we can’t pinpoint who was to blame. It just happened. I wanted to know where my first wife had been “infected” with cancer. Was it something in the water in Oklahoma? Or was it the oil refineries in south Louisiana? Was she exposed to some chemical where she grew up in Mississippi? At last, the oncologist asked me, “If I could tell you, would it really make any difference, at this point?” (She had been diagnosed at stage four. “Stages? How many stages are there?” I had naively asked.) Knowing where she had “fallen,” greatly mattered to me, at least at the time. Beneath the question, “Where did I fall?” is the human desire to know why. This is the question that plaques us: “why?” Why do bad things happen to us? Job, a perfectly innocent man, wanted to know. His “friends” trotted out the standard answer: cause and effect. Bad stuff happens even to good people when good people do bad stuff. “So, Job, as good as you are, you surely did something wrong somewhere, confess it, and maybe good stuff will come your way.” …