Bridges

Our Daily Bread
Bill Clinton visited Louisville, Kentucky during one of his presidential campaigns. In a stirring speech, he said something like "And together, we will build a bridge to the future...". Some of us laughed and thought "We can't even build a bridge to Southern Indiana!"  Ha! The much needed bridge was completed a few years ago and successfully redirects traffic away from a busy downtown interchange.

The devotional talks about followers of Christ being a bridge between God and unbelievers. Through our words and deeds, we share God's Word and God's love. We help them cross over from thinking only about this world to thinking about the things of God. As we live, consider this question -- are we building bridges to God for others or are we burning them?

Lord, you give us the tools to build bridges for others. Please help us use them.

Teaching Tuesday
We didn't have class last night because of the weather, but I thought a lot about the long, tedious chapter we had to read for Year 3 EFMers. It was about the period in history called the Dark Ages, highlighted by the Black Plague. Not exactly the feel good chapter of the year! Here is an interesting article about that period [article].

The chapter is interesting in the study of church history because of the implications of the Black Plague -- people questioned God and people wanted to know who was to blame for the plague! There were many theories. One theory I did not understand was folks blaming the Jews for the plague.  What?

The end of the chapter was interesting because it talked about Erasmus. Read about him here. The section in the book was both inspirational and confusing as it talked about Erasmus. There is also some discussion by historians about Erasmus being gay because of some letters he wrote to a fellow seminarian. The book was very clear in stating the Erasmus never let his passions affect him again for the rest of his life. For me, there are so many more things I want to know about when I meet God that the sexual preferences of Erasmus are a very low priority!

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“The highest pinnacle of the spiritual life is not happy joy in unbroken sunshine, but absolute and undoubting trust in the love of God.” = A. W. Thorold