The Plumbline

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. (Thomas A. Edison) So, let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. (Galatians 6:9) We all have those moments when we just want to give up on whatever it is we have in front of us, don't we? The burden is too great, the task too daunting, the journey too long. The more we focus on the difficulty of it all, the more we just want to quit. If we were honest, we have likely already 'quit' on a few things in life that we began with so much gusto, but somewhere down the road, we just plain 'burned out'. Life isn't about the starts - it is also about the finishes. What someone forgot to tell us was there is a whole lot of hard stuff between those two! Life gets messy, choices get hard, and things get rather complicated. We don't want to go on, but there are demands put on us that te...

I am not a 'runner' like some are - simply because my knees cannot take that stress. I do enjoy a good brisk walk, though. In a spiritual sense, we all 'run' a race, so to speak - just as in the natural sense of running, we need to learn the spiritual principles that help us to run so as not to hurt ourselves. Some of us will run in a direction all of our own choosing, but when we do, we run alone. As a believer in Christ, we run in a race alongside the greatest runner of all times - Christ himself. If having his example (pace-setting) before us is not enough, he left us with a huge crowd of "models" who also ran the race and won. We can learn much by considering how they ran. Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we'd better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this ...

Back in caveman days, the hammer and chisel were employed to record specific details that may have needed recording for others to see. The stone would be carved out, or perhaps a large section of fallen tree. The use of such rudimentary tools to communicate are a thing of the past. In today's electronic age, we seldom resort to "snail mail" as a means of keeping in touch with others in our lives, much less the use of hammer and chisel on stone. It is the "immediacy" of email and instant messaging which makes it all the more appealing to us - the ability to 'get the message out' to the intended audience in record speed draws us in. In the past, the "news" we'd share about changes in our lives would come via the postal service, arriving to the recipient days after the "news" was indeed "news". In the military, we had mail call. It was a time when we'd all gather around in hopes of one link to home in the form of a s...