The Best Christmas We Could Ever Have

Would you like to do something that could make this Christmas be the best one you have ever had? What if you could cause another family to have the best month they have ever experienced in their lives? Would that make your own the greatest? That's what I plan to do this Christmas and I am inviting you to join me in doing the same.

As you know, I'm working to put together a plan to help the destitute people in Swaziland in an ongoing way during 2008. What I'd like to do immediately is to help families in the village of Mafutseni have a wonderful Christmas season.

Three hundred dollars can feed a family of four for a month, buy clothes for the children and provide medicine for the family. I've shared with you about the HIV/AIDS pandemic there, but there are many more diseases ruining life for these dear folks too, including cholera, malaria, hepatitis A,B and C,typhoid fever,parasitic diseases,Dengue fever and countless others. The sad thing is that many are suffering who could easily have help if funds were available.

Melanie and I are going to personally give 300 dollars to help a family in the village of Mafutseni,the place we visited. There are about 1000 familes there. Wouldn't it be great if we could help the whole villlage?

Will you pray about joining us in making another family have an incredibly great month? If you can't give that much, could your Sunday School class do it? Could your extended family give it? Ask the Holy Spirit to provide the money for you to share and then open your mind to creative ways to come up with it.

Every cent you give for this will go to them. Not a penny will be kept for administrative costs or anything like that. I just want to see us impact these folks with the love of Christ. Will you help? Giving another family the best month they've ever lived certainly would make this the best Christmas season you've ever experienced. Don't you agree?

You can call our office at 800-472-2311 to use your credit card or send your check to Grace Walk Ministries,P.O. Box 3669,Riverview, FL 33568. Will you also help spread the word on this? Imagine knowing you've made such an impact on another family's life in this way. This really is the love of Christ in action.

Get This Book

Now and then you find a book that pulls you into its story in such a way that you can hardly put it down. That's how I found this book to be. I began reading it two nights ago and couldn't make myself stop reading until late. Then last night I picked it back up and read until I had finished it. The word that came into my mind as I finished reading was "Wow." This is a powerful book that I highly recommend.


The storyline is about Mackenzie Allen Phillips and his struggle to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the fact that his daughter was kidnapped and brutally murdered. One day Mack finds a note from "Papa" in his mailbox, inviting him to return to the abandoned shack deep in the woods where his daughter was killed.

Against his better judgement, he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks right into his darkest nightmare. What he doesn't expect to find there is God,who is nothing like the religious god Mack had always imagined. Papa and the other two Persons of the Trinity spend the weekend with Mack, laughing, eating, talking, crying and mostly healing Mack's devastated emotions and restoring faith to his troubled soul.

Young does an exceptional job in The Shack showing the intimacy of the relationship shared between the Trinity and in demonstrating how He wants to share that same intimacy with us. I found myself laughing, crying, looking inward to my own doubts and fears, and finally looking upward to the God who is "especially fond of me."

I encourage you to go to amazon.com right now and buy this book. I checked out the author's web site this morning (www.theshackbook.com)and learned that Young has himself been severely hurt in life and apparently still is recovering from great trials he has faced, a fact which helps me understand how he can communicate God's faithfulness and love in the face of calamity with such pathos.

The Shack is a grace filled book that will encourage you to trust your "Papa" no matter what may be going on in your life.

Too Much of Jesus

My friend Roger sent the email to me concerning our friends Kevin and Lauren's son, Seth. I think this says it all.


Our friends, Kevin and Lauren have a four year old son, Seth, that is fascinated with “playing Church”. His bedroom is all set up as a sanctuary: a set of old speakers up front, a music stand as a podium, even some lamps as flood lights. He comes home from church and does it all again.

He’s the preacher! Last week he informed his parents that he needed a table for his church. “I need a table for Jesus’ dinner”. His parents didn’t react quickly enough, so Seth pulled an end table from the living room down the hall to his bedroom.

Finding his mother he told her he wanted to have supper for Jesus. She then understood that he wanted to celebrate Communion. He said he needed a plate of food; she brought some loaf bread broken into pieces. Then he needed a glass of blood…. She brought a glass of apple juice. At last he wanted his ten year old sister, Abby and both his parents to come to his church for supper with Jesus.

Seth ate a piece of bread dipped in the juice, then each of his parents took their turn. When Abby went to the plate she took two pieces of bread. With that Preacher Seth slapped Abby across the face exclaiming, “you’re eating too much of Jesus!”

There is a lesson in all of this, our Savior’s gift of forgiveness and life is more than enough for every person that has ever lived or ever will live… and yes, He welcomes those who want more of Him.

The Loopy Life

My grandsons spent the night with us last night so that Hannah, our granddaughter, could have her home to herself for a spend-the-night-party with a group of her girlfriends from school. Today is her tenth birthday.

I would have never dreamed grandchildren could be so much fun. To be able to enjoy all these privileges without the responsibilities of child rearing . . . life doesn't get better than this. Example: This morning, as Jonathan and Jeremy were eating their donuts for breakfast, Jonathan (7 years old) commented, "I want a snack after we finish breakfast." So after breakfast, he was given Pringles potato chips. Hey, ya only live once.

Last night as he and I were sitting in my recliner together, Jonathan was acting silly and I was laughing at him. Suddenly he turned and said to me, "I'm a loopy boy! Granddaddy, you should act loopy sometimes. Working all the time isn't fun, but it's fun to to loopy!"

I think he's right. In fact, that's what Melanie and I were doing as Batman and Catwoman in the picture above. This was taken a few weeks ago when we were with our grandchilden for . . .ugh... let's call it our "Family Fall Festival" for the sake of those who would be troubled to think I might have dressed up in a costume on the wrong day of the year. It was one loopy night, that's for sure. I hope to have many more of them with my grandchildren as the years pass. In fact, I hope to have many more as a general rule. Jonathan is right ... acting loopy sometimes is fun. I think that, in the long run, it can even make my work be more productive. Do you think Jesus ever "acted loopy" with His disciples? I like to think that He did.

Looking In The Right Place

Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, Who seek the Lord: Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug. (Isaiah 51:1)

What a great verse, tucked away here in the book of Isaiah, about how we can find righteousness! This sounds like something the Apostle Paul might have said. If we want to be righteous, we need to look in the right place. The place to look is to the Rock of Ages, the One in whom we find our very life.

The pursuit of righteousness is a God-given desire, but for those of us who know Christ the search is over. For a Christian to keep looking for righteousness through what he does is a waste of time and completely unneccesary. An illustration may make my point:

Some time ago as I was about to leave our home, I picked up my keys and my money clip from the table beside my chair in the living room. My sunglasses weren't there. I went to my desk in my home office and they weren't there either. "Have you seen my sunglasses?" I yelled to Melanie, who was in the other room. "No, I haven't seen them," she answered.

I always keep my sunglasses beside my chair on that table. So I went back into the living room and looked again. Nope, they weren't there. So back to my desk I went to more carefully look. (This is a ridiculous habit I have, looking in the same places more than once when I've lost something.) The glasses still weren't there.

"Are you sure you didn't move them when you were cleaning?" I yelled to Melanie again. "I haven't touched them," she answered. "Maybe I left them beside the bed on the nightstand," I thought. But they weren't there either.

Now I was beginning to get frustrated. I knew that my sunglasses didn't just disappear and I knew that Melanie had cleaned the living room earlier in the day. It doesn't take a genius (just a husband) to put two and two together. "Melanie," I called, "you must have moved them. They aren't where I left them." "I haven't touched your glasses," Melanie said from the other room in a way that let me know I was pushing the envelope. "Why in the world would she move them and then not remember?" I silently thought to myself.

Then the thought occurred to me that I would check in the bathroom. I knew I had never felt a need to wear my sunglasses in there before, but I'd check just to be sure. I went into the bathroom and looked all around the bathtub and toilet. Just as I suspected - no sunglasses. I turned to glance around the sink and . . . then, um, I, ugh, caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. There they were - pushed back on my head. I had been wearing them the whole time. The thing I had been looking so diligently for, I already had. I thought the prudent thing would be to simply tell Melanie I found them in the bathroom if she asked. She really didn't need more information than that. Thankfully, she didn't ask.

My search for my sunglasses isn't unlike the search many people conduct in an attempt to become more righteous. We try to find it in the church. Then we look in our daily Bible reading to see if it can be found there. Then we try to find it in our prayer life. All the while, the righteousness we are trying to find is already ours. We need only to look to "the Head," to Jesus Himself. What we are looking for, we already have because Christ, the Head of the church is our very Life.

The good news of grace is that you can stop searching for righteousness. Just look to your Source. Christ is your righteousness. You can relax.

The Year of Living Biblically

I came across this book as I was browsing in a bookstore at the airport while waiting to board my flight to Japan. It looked like it would be amusing, mindless brain-candy and it lived up to my expectations.

Author A.J. Jacobs is the editor of Esquire and has written other books that have made the New York Times Best Seller List. Though not a Christian, he took on the challenge to answer the question, what would happen if a modern-day American followed every single rule in the Bible as literally as possible? For a year that is what he attempted to do - seek out the rules of the Bible and live by them.

Jacobs didn't just lock in on the big ones, but many that are obscure to most people. Things like don’t wear clothes of mixed fibers, grow your beard, stone adulterers. He even bound the ten commandments on his forehead at one point in the book.

His journey in "biblical living" took him across the spectrum of the religious world, from the wailing wall in Jerusalem to a snake handling church service in a backwoods country church.

For the most part, I found the book to be amusing. On the positive side, it shows the ridiculous nature of legalistic living, made obvious when it is carried to its utmost extreme. On the negative side, I thought the book was irreverent toward the Bible itself at times.

There are many books a person can read that will help them more than this one. In fact, I'm not sure there's much help here, but the book will cause the reader to chuckle throughout the read and certainly shows the folly of approaching the Bible as a rule book instead of the love letter it is intended to be.