Shade Tree Wisdom 3/11/08

It was really pleasant this morning. It had rained a little more during the night and the air seemed washed clean and invigorating. And what’s more, the doctor was right, ”the more you walk”, she said, “the easier it gets. Muscles will respond and the ache in your legs will go away.” And that is right. A bit farther each day, and thank God for this improvement.

Look at the news. The Houston Rockets, that’s our NBA team, has won 19 in a row, some kind of record, and that’s with their big man, Yao Ming, out with an operation on a stress fracture on his left foot. Out for the season.

And for the rest of the news, mostly downhill, isn’t it? The governor of New York found to be consorting with prostitutes, the Harris County in Texas resigning because of some hanky-panky with a secretary, the mayor of Detroit under the same sort of cloud. These are people who ought to set an example by behavior.

St. Paul found this sort of thing when he wrote to the Romans, a cosmopolitan city, powerful, to be envied, highly regarded, the Master of the world. St. Paul points out they were “very religious". There were many gods and temples. Yet, he asks, what did it get you, this plurality of religions? He points out that mankind lives under the wrath of god. People, Paul points out, know about God, yet ignore Him. So they fall under God’s wrath. And it shows. “Look at them,” Paul writes in Roans 1, “mean spirited, venomous, God-bashers,. . .they keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. . .they know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care.” (MSG gives one the full flavor).

From that start, St. Paul gives them the reason why Jesus Christ came. And there is help for the sinner.

That’s the story that God has given us to tell. There is help, there is a solution to the problems that we are born with, there is a loving God who sent His only Son to die on the cross that we might be saved. It’s a simple solution, yet it is the one solution that meets our desperate needs. Let us then be up and doing, living in that faith, and gladly sharing that faith with the world we live in.

GPD 3/11/08