The Plumbline

When I was a child, we had this yellowed and well-aged Tupperware container which was filled with all manner of buttons.  As clothing were worn out, the buttons would be severed from the worn garment and they would be added to the button box.  Buttons ranged from big, bulky ones which probably adorned coats and outerwear in days gone by, to smaller, rather plain ones which likely held shirts together.  That old button box was pulled out on more occasions than I can count to mend a shirt cuff with a missing button, or add a finishing touch to some outfit.  From rich brown to bright white, the colors were sure to match something somewhere down the line.  We'd dump them out, finding just the right one to match the one we'd carelessly lost somewhere along the way.  One thing I always remembered about that box - no button was too insignificant to add to it.  If the garment was no longer able to fulfill the purpose for which it had been created because of t...

We all go through life with hundreds upon hundreds of things being input into our brain activity each and every day.  Those things can be the purest of thoughts to the most awful of sights, sounds,  and opinions.  How we manage to "filter" out the stuff we should be letting go of and not spending much time actually considering too deeply or allowing to affect our inner peace is something which takes each of us a little time and effort to actually develop.  Sometimes we don't allow our "filters" to work all that well, with things getting past those filters, and then beginning to affect our inner peace.  When this happens, we begin to latch onto things which may not have much rational basis, but we come to hold onto them nonetheless.  It is important to recognize when things are irrational - but equally as important to recognize the rational "inside" the irrational.  For anything to be even remotely "accepted" by our brains as factual or worth...

I run into people in all walks of life, "trying" to serve Jesus, but struggling with obedience, all the while knowing I am not unlike these fellow believers in my "trying".  "Try" as we might, we don't always get things right the first time.  This is kind of the way most of us learn things - by trying, failing, and trying again.  If I had given up on learning to tie my shoes as a child, long before the days of velcro fasteners, I'd have had to go barefoot!  If I had given up on mastering the clutch, brake, and gas combination, I'd never have learned to drive a stick-shift.  We define "success" in terms of something we call "failure" - hit the nail on the head each time you swing the hammer and we call it success; hit your thumb a few times and we call it failure.  I challenge us to think of failure as another form of "success" - simply because we often make the determination we will not choose to place our finger ...