Trust

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."  Proverbs 3:5

It's been a few weeks since I've posted anything here on the site, and I suspect that some of you had hoped that maybe I had moved on.  Not so.  I'm back.  Actually, I took a week off from work last month.  My wife and one of my daughters decided that I needed to go on a Western Caribbean cruise.  Ordinarily, if I take a week off, I generally like to finish up some projects at home or go to a warm beach somewhere with internet access.  I like to dabble in writing code for Linux and to play with AutoCad and Adobe software. 

Well, cruise ships generally have internet access, but it's expensive for any significant band width.  So, I was left with sitting on the deck watching the Gulf of Mexico go by, long talks with my wife (not so bad), and reading.  Now, I have never been one who reads for pleasure, unlike the rest of my family.  But during this one week, I read four books - more than I had read in one summer since the summer reading contests at the Hopkins County Library when I was at Pride Avenue Elementary school.  I read A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Jesus Wants to Save Christians and Love Wins by Rob Bell, and Crazy Love by Francis Chan.  I can honestly say that I would recommend all four. Of course, you need a curious but open mind to appreciate any of them, especially the Stephen Hawking book about cosmology for dummies.

Love Wins has created quite a stir on the Christian blog sites since even before it was released.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book because Bell openly and scripturally discusses many of the topics that a lot of us more conservative folks have been hesitant to bring out of the closet.  More than anything, the book focuses on a God who cannot be put in a box, who loves us more than we can imagine, and who will stop at nothing to have a loving relationship with everyone who has ever lived and who will ever live in the future.

Love Wins, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, and Crazy Love are all about the ministry of Jesus and His commandments to love God with all of our being and to love our neighbors (friends and enemies) as ourselves.  Often times, nonChristians seem to do a better job of loving neighbors than we who are believers.  The books are also about the Kingdom of God being here and now.

As I reflected on the message of each book, I decided that the lesson of the week for me was "trust" - trust in a God whose very nature is love and who was there at the beginning of time, no matter what exactly happened next; and trust in His son, Jesus, who taught us how to live and to care for one another.  Oh yeah, He also took on the sins of all those who came before Him and those of us who have come since.  He was put to death by "religious" people like us, whom He loved dearly.  He walked out of the tomb, having reconciled all people back into the relationship that God had intended, and lives with us still through His Holy Spirit.

I also learned to trust that a 17 story floating hotel will neither roll over nor sink, that (2) 23,000 horsepower propulsion systems are enough if one breaks down, that there are no Somali pirates near the Cayman Islands, and that the nice fellow from Mumbai who serves the scrambled eggs does not have Norwalk virus.

RBL
ps.  Speaking of God's love, you may want to check out this post by David Ewart, "What Does God Do with a Dead Terrorist?"