Blog # 169 Our Creator 'at work'

Blog # 169 Our Creator 'at Work'. Here are a few examples of what God is 'doing' in our physical universe. God the Creator is also present and 'at work' in the spiritual reality we cannot see or hear but which we experience just as surely and wonderfully as we see and hear the physical world around us. The sun (a small star) is BIG - so big that if you put the earth in its center, the moon ( 220,000+miles from the earth) would reach just about half way to the sun's surface. Compared to the sun the earth is like a pinhead in the center of a saucer. Traveling 1,000 miles an hour, it would take you a month , going night and day, to go around the sun. At the same speed you could go around the earth in 25 hours! As for speed,Pluto, the 'slow' planet, is moving more than 23,000 miles an hour. The fastest planet is Mercury, doing 30 miles a second - more than 100,000 miles an hour. Earth moves 18 miles a second, 65,000 miles an hour, and covers 1,500,000 miles a day around the sun. (All free of charge!) In our galactic system there are so many stars that if you looked at each one of them for a minute you would be 60,000 years old before you counted them all. If we really care to look almost everything we experience in creation is just as amazing.We inhale about 108,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (21 ciphers after the 8!) molecules of air at each normal healthy breath. If you could arrange to let those molecules escape at the rate of 10,000 each second, it would take a million years to blow out one breath. The molecules in an air space the size of a golf ball, if placed end to end 4,250,000 per inch, would circle the earth 10,000 times at the equator, or reach to the moon and back 52 times. An average oak tree, in its five active months each year, evaporates about 28,000 gallons of water. Man-made suction cups make water rise 33 feet. Yet water flows in great quantities to the tops of trees 200 feet high. There is a Brazilian moth with a wing span of eleven inches. There is also the Nanosella, a water beetle one-hundredth of an inch long complete with eyes, mouth, legs, etc. If a man could construct a tiny machine designed to walk and fly, with automatic appliances for finding and consuming food, for building itself a suitable garage or shed, for repairing breaks in its parts, and finally for reproducing other machines like itself, his name would be world-famous overnight. Yet it has been done ! (The name is God if you care to tell someone). What is color in the dark, or sound unheard? It is perhaps something like Goodness unappreciated or a person's life without personal contact with God our Creator. There is still the choice that any man can make: there is no God. But it seems very important to me for someone who does happen to say there is no God to know something of the content of what he is saying. Some people never look beyond themselves. Some people look out but only see what they see. Others see the work of a Workman, and see God. In the light of some of the previous considerations how minor some of our personal problems seem ! And why do we not hear more of this kind of thing when we speak of God? How wonderful it is to trust and love Someone Who has and shares such wisdom, power, and goodness with all who believe in Him !

Blog # 61 A WORK OF ART - by God's design

Blog # 61 A WORK OF ART, by God's design. Think for a moment of a great artist in a paint store. Moving among the colors spread out on the shelves, the artist selects several of them and brings them into his studio. The artist has a commission to paint a picture of a beautiful sunset. The colors chosen at the store are to be used in the painting. In order to play their part in the creation of the painting the various colors must give themselves, some of them spread on the canvas just as they are, others to be blended with darker shades of the same color or lightened with white. Each of the colors is poured out and recreated in the skill of the artist to share with the other colors in the final masterpiece. We have a parallel with the artist his colors and his masterpiece in God's dealings with us who believe in God. As there were other colors on the shelf in the store not chosen for this particular picture, so it would seem there are some persons in the world who have not yet come to know the Lord personally, perhaps through no fault of their own. But we who do believe in God and love God know we have been chosen by God to share in a very definite way in creating with God a certain reality which can very well be called a masterpiece, a vine, a body, a church. We know God wants all men and women throughout the world to share in the destiny of Jesus, but for the time being many do not know it, many do not believe. We who do believe are like the colors selected by the artist. But in order to share actually in the plan of God for us we must believe, be born from above, change, be holy, become like little children, forgive our brothers and sisters from our hearts, reform our lives. As Jesus put it on another occasion, unless we take up our cross daily and come after Him we cannot be His disciples, we cannot share His destiny, we cannot die, rise, and be glorified through, with, and in Him. We remain merely colors rather than an integral part of a beautiful masterpiece.

Blog # 50 CREATION

Blog # 50 CREATION Did you ever go into someone's home and notice on the mantle or on an end table a stone or a dried flower? You might have asked about it and found that it is very meaningful and precious to the person who lives in the house. The stone was the one the husband sent home from Europe during the Second World War, when it was not at all certain he would safely return. The flower is the one he and she picked together on the occasion when they walked in the woods and he asked if she would marry him. The flower is not the most beautiful, perhaps, nor the stone of precious material, but both the stone and the flower are very meaningful, not in themselves alone, but in the message they still bring, in the relationship they express, and in the love they nourish and recall. For those who know the story the stone and the flower are indeed precious. If you do not know their story the stone and the flower are real but not special . We have a situation that is parallel to this in the response and interpretation various people give to the reality of creation all around us. For a plumber who comes to the house to fix the kitchen sink the stone and the flower may not even be noticed. You could be in their presence as you passed through the living room on your way to the kitchen, but not even see them or only see them momentarily as they flashed through your sight on your way to accomplish the purpose or goal you had in mind for yourself. Some people live for long periods of time in the world as all of us know it and never see God's Hand or hear God's Voice. They treat the world in a very practical sort of way, use it to make a living, enjoy its pleasures, avoid its dangers, and appreciate its great beauty, but never see hear or touch more than the eye the ear or the skin can tell them. Other people live in the same world as the first group, with the same beauty and power, the same possibilities for pleasure or for pain, with the same colors shapes and sounds, the same sun and moon and stars, but they see and hear more, and differently. They know the story behind it all. They know God !