Super Bowl Sunday

This weekend is Super Bowl Sunday - now a national sports holiday.  The ticket cost for the first Super Bowl?  Six dollars.  The cost for a ticket for this Super Bowl - priceless.  The official cost of a 30 second commercial is $4 million.  The players on the winning team will receive $92,000, on the losing team players receive a measly $46,000.

Everything about the Super Bowl is big.  There is good and bad in the bigness.  The bad is that this event is perhaps the cause of the largest sex trafficking effort in the country.  I'm not blaming New York, the Super host city is always that way.  FBI statistics tell us that the average age of a girl to get caught up in sex trafficking is 12-14 after she enters this world, her life expectancy is seven years.  There are 1.5 million victims of human trafficking in the U. S. generating for those who use and abuse them $87  million a day.

There is a dark side we need to pray about on Super Bowl Sunday but there is also an opportunity for light to shine in the center of all this attention.  It is a great platform for players and others to share their faith.  Some coaches and players of the Seattle Seahawks  have prepared a video to share their faith in Christ and what it means to them.  You can watch it by going to this link:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC1iD8yzndM
It is fifteen minutes long but worth the time or you can show up for the Youth Super Bowl party Sunday night at 5:30pm in the Student Center where it will be shown at half time.

There will (hopefully) be many feats of great athletes on Super Bowl Sunday but this Sunday morning I want to share with you the story of the greatest athletic effort I think that I have ever seen.  It did not happen at the Super Bowl, obviously I can't afford that, it happened at a Junior High track meet not far from Victoria and it came from the most unlikely person. I hope you will come Sunday.  I pray it will be super and I promise it will not cost you a dime.

for the journey...

Tim

The Deicer

A couple of years ago this month when my daughter Kelley and I flew to Denver to see our friend Caleb Jentsch after his skiing accident, I encountered a part of air travel I had never experienced before - the air plane deicer.  This is a picture of the one who did our plane before we came home.  I realized this was not a job I would ever want, being held up in the air in an open basket in sub-freezing temperatures spraying liquid onto an airplane as north winds howled around shaking the basket and blowing the wet spray back on you.  I watched this guy in admiration and prayed he did not get too cold to be careless and call our plane "good enough" when it might be packing a little too much ice weight.  Fortunately he took no shortcuts; he did his job well and we came home uneventfully.

These cold temperatures and ice that we have experienced reminded me of this man and his sacrifice.  I also thought about how to really help people get free from the baggage that accumulates in life that weighs us down and causes us to crash, it takes a sacrifice.  It is not easy work and there are never easy conditions for it.

When Jesus hung on the cross with the weight of our sin upon himself along with all the scorn and ridicule of those there blowing back in his face, it took a huge sacrifice.  He took no shortcuts.  He did a job that we could not do for ourselves and enabled us to get to our destination.  We are indebted to him.  The deicer did it for pay; Jesus did it out of love.  I now understand a little more about how much love based on how much the sacrifice was.

That is the core of what we believe and live by in Christ, he died to set us free.  May that always be our core.  We will talk more about this Sunday.

for the journey...

Tim

Defining Life

I have mentioned before how much I appreciate Dr. Jim Denison's Website and daily essay.  I can not think of anything more appropriate for this day.  I can also not think of any better way to say what he writes about in this essay.  It is well worth the time and well worth your consideration.

http://www.denisonforum.org/cultural-commentary/936-brain-dead-woman-kept-on-life-support-because-she-is-pregnant

for the journey...

Tim

Sun Days

Our sun is a moderate sized star 864,000 miles in diameter, that's 109 times bigger than earth.  That does not seem moderate but compared to other stars it is.  It's surface is around 25 million degrees F and it consumes 657 million tons of hydrogen every second.  Remind yourself of that the next time you pay your gas bill. 

We have nothing to worry about though because our sun will burn for another 4 or 5 billion years.  Take the sun burning out off your worry list for 2014.  But what does that leave on your worry list for this new year?

Perhaps thinking again about the sun can help, or better yet, the sun's creator.  If God is able to make something of that magnitude, strength and duration -as well as all the other suns in our universe - how big and how strong must He be?  How vast are His sources of strength if He equipped our sun with that kind of power?

Though we can see the sun, we cannot see His infinite strength where we will need it in our future but we can be sure that it will be there because He will be there.  This Sunday - no pun intended - we will look at the source of this verse, "The Lord watches over you...the sun will not harm you by day nor the moon by night."

Do you know where that verse is?  Join me Sunday and we will look at that along with all the other promises that orbit around it.

for the journey...

Tim