And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. -narrator in Fellowship of the Ring

Another July 4 has gone by, one where once again we drank in large gulps the blessing of family, wishing time would stand still. To paraphrase Lewis, it was a very pleasant inn.

As often happens, a small comment captured me: my oldest sister was shocked to learn that there was once a Kroger grocery in our hometown. She never knew that until tonight.

How much knowledge is lost with every passing soul; how quickly it fades away! My great grandfather fought in the Civil War; today we know little of him. My aunt, frail and in her 90s, remembers sitting upon his knee as a small child. That is most of what I know of him.

I can ask my mom what life was like growing up in the 1930s. She has presented many small slices. Some are even in writing or on tape. However, the intricacies of family life and the farm are lost except for perhaps a few anecdotes that will be repeated to the next generation. A generation or two after that, even that will likely be gone.

Look about you now. Think of your family, of your town, of your life. Most of what you see and know will be lost to the ages in 50 years. In 100 years, our children’s children will perhaps wonder what we all used to talk about, what life was like for us, what we were like. I’m doing little more than restating Ecclesiastes, but how few are our years.

I do not think history is lost. God knows it, after all. It seems not too speculative to say that heaven will be rich with history.

When the waters saw you, O God,when the waters saw you, they were afraid; indeed, the deep trembled. -Psalm 77:16

even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. -Psalm 139:12

You never quite know what’s going to come in from the deep when you snorkel in the ocean. I’ve been surprised by sea turtles, grouper, barracuda, and small jellyfish (sadly, no reef sharks!). I remember floating once over a shallow shelf being startled to see an eel lurking out of a hole about a foot under my stomach. There was no room to paddle, so floating was the only option; it seemed to take forever to steer clear as I watched the little fellow ominously grinning the way eels do.

Once I joined a night manta dive in Hawaii. Never having learned to scuba, I snorkeled alone while the divers went to the bottom. They shot floodlights from there. From the dark, silent waters, huge mantas eerily wandered into the lit areas. Some majestically glided a few feet beneath where I floated.

I eventually became more interested in looking away from the rays, the boats, and the shoreline, and out into the murky blackness all around. The water was lapping about me. I thought about what lurks out there. Was a hammerhead sizing me up? I looked down and was startled to not see the lights any longer. The divers had gone back to the ship and I was alone! For a brief moment the terror of the deep hit me. How horrible it’d be to be left floating in the vast ocean alone at night! I can’t describe it, but I’ll never forget it.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, our God is not a tame lion.

Last weekend presented a nice opportunity: clear skies and a new moon (well, close enough). And so the telescope and I visited my boyhood back yard, well away from the city.

It may be an urban legend, but I read once where a power outage occurred in a city and many residents reported seeing UFOs and other strange sights in the sky. It turns out that they were just seeing the stars and the Milky Way. Much can be said for urban conveniences, but it’s really a shame that many never get to see the stars in their glory. In rural areas, light pollution — the combined result of security lights, all-night gas stations, etc. — is increasingly a problem. The back yard isn’t what it once was, and that is a sad thing.

In any event, as we sit in our houses reading, conversing, watching a ball game, or sleeping, the heavens silently declare God’s glory. Observing the lovely M3 last Friday, it struck me that this thing is there every day and night, waiting for all to look upon its glory. It’s a half a million stars, 34 thousand light years away from the earth. Not far away in the sky is M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. It looks like a smudgy blob in my telescope. It’s not like the pictures, but still, but there it is, countless numbers (trillions?) of stars forming a galaxy 30+ million light years from our own galaxy.

M3 and M51 are two glorious, mind-boggling profusions of splendor amid trillions in God’s great universe.

If you get a chance, go out around the time of the next new moon and see the heavens. Take along a planisphere and some binoculars and just sweep along the Milky Way. Enjoy God through His creation.

There are wise and kind words here not only for a pastor, but for all of us with elderly parents and relatives.

The benediction that we pronounce today with hands uplifted is a symbolic expression of the minister touching his people… Jesus understood the importance of touching those to whom He ministered. Very often, when He healed people, He touched them. We see a beautiful example of this in Matthew 8… Jesus not only healed the leper, He touched the man. Jesus ministered to his physical need and also to his need for human contact. People today need that touch. That’s why an important moment in church on Sunday morning is when the pastor interacts with the worshipers as they depart. I tell my students in the seminary that there’s an art to greeting people at the door after the church service. It’s vitally important for the pastor to extend his hand and at least offer to shake hands with every person who comes by. Some will walk right by, but the vast majority of people want to stop and shake the pastor’s hand. If that person is an elderly man or woman, and especially if it is an elderly widow, the pastor should never, ever shake with one hand. He must take that lady’s hand in both of his hands. Why? It is because she needs that special touch, because she experiences loneliness. In giving her that tender, loving touch, the pastor is being Christ to the people, giving the Master’s touch in His name to people who are afraid, or who are lonely, or who are hurting. People want to be touched, not in an evil sense, but in a tender and merciful sense, in a human sense. -R.C. Sproul, A Taste of Heaven, p.165-66

But, you object, a heart like mine can offer Christ so little — at best, so poor and pinched and stingey a hospitality and such meagre fare; for I have nothing worthy of Him to set before Him, only a kind of affection, real enough at times, but which, at others, can and does so easily forget; only a will, quite unreliable, deplorably unstable; only a faith that is the merest shadow of what His real friends mean when they speak about faith, I know. But, there was once a garret up under the roof, a poor, bare place enough. There was a table in it, and there were some benches, and a water-pot; a towel, and a basin in behind the door, but not much else — a bare, unhomelike room. But the Lord Christ entered into it. And, from that moment, it became the holiest of all, where souls innumerable ever since have met the Lord God, in High glory, face to face. And, if you give Him entrance to that very ordinary heart of yours, it too He will transform and sanctify and touch with a splendour of glory. -AJ Gossip

A wonderful, 1826 passage from Swiss pastor Felix Neff, quoted from “Evangelicalism Divided:”

[I]n this impure and dark world, this obscure quarry, whence the Great Builder is pleased to take some stones for his edifice, what shall we find, but work-yards for a season, where everything appears to be in a movement and disorder? What unshapen stones, what rubbish, what fragments!

How many things fit only for temporary service! How many arrangements merely provisional! How many mercenaries and foreigners are occupied in these quarries… How many dissentions among the laborers, how many conjectures and disputes about the final purposes of the Great Architect… which are known only to Himself! Shall we search in this chaos for the true church, the spiritual temple? Shall we endeavor to arrange, in one exact and uniform order, all those stones that we find in the various quarries opened in a thousand places in the world? Oh, how much wiser is the Master! While some are disputing about the excellence of this or the other department of the work; and while others are spending their strength in endeavoring to introduce perfect order, the wise Master-builder surveys, in silence, the vast scene of operations, chooses and marks the materials which he sees to be prepared amidst all this confusion, and causes them to be removed and placed in his heavenly edifice; assigning to every piece the place most proper for it, and for which he has designed it. Such, my beloved brethren, is the sublime idea which we ought to form of this universal church. Oh! How contemptible now will appear, in our eyes, those endless disputes which have at all times divided the believers, and continue to do so to the present day. Let us rather labor in the quarry where our work is assigned, to prepare as great a quantity of materials as possible; and especially, let us entreat the Lord to make us all lively stones fit for his building. Amen!

Commenting on Luke 24:50 (“Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them.”), Hendriksen says:

Acts 1:11 “This same Jesus will come back in the same way.”
If, then, he departed while blessing his disciples, and if he is coming again with blessing for his church, does it not follow that even now, during the intervening period, he, as representative of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, delights in being for his people a source of blessing? Also, that he wants us, in a derived or secondary manner, to be a blessing to everyone with whom we come into contact?

And on Luke 24:51 (“While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.”):

Matt. 28:20 “I am with you always.”
He departed in order to remain with his church; in fact, now more than ever. When he was still on earth he was not able physically to be everywhere at the same time. But now that he is in heaven he is able, in and through the Holy Spirit, to be everywhere (not bodily, to be sure, but spiritually). Also, while he was still on earth he was present with the church. Now he is present in the church. In other words, he has departed from us in order to draw closer to us.

“Quickly bring a robe, the best one,” etc. Note the intensity of the joy resulting from the successful search… Is not the material found in Luke 15 [the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, the Prodigal Son]… very suitable for meditation during the week previous to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, or on the very Sunday of communion? -William Hendriksen

And [the Pharisees] said to him, The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink. And Jesus said to them, Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days. -Luke 5:33-35

The late William Hendriksen commented:

The important truth which Jesus here reveals and which makes the passage so practical and filled with comfort especially for today is that for those who acknowledge Christ as their Lord and Savior the proper attitude of heart and mind is not that of sadness but that of gladness. If it be true that “God with us” (Immanuel) spells joy for believers, should not “God within us” (the situation on and after Pentecost) awaken in every child of God joy unspeakable and full of glory? It was in order to bring such abounding joy that Jesus came on earth and that he, through his sacrificial death, brought salvation full and free. See Luke 2:10: “good tidings of great joy”; 24:52 “they…returned to Jerusalem with great joy”; John 15:11 “that your joy may be full”; 17:13: “that they may have my joy made full in themselves.” The apostles learned that lesson (Rom 5:11; 15:13; Gal. 5:22; Philippians, the entire epistle; 1 Peter 1:8; 4:13; 1 John 1:4; 2 John 12). -New Testament Commentary on Luke, p. 310

Or as the Psalmist so beautifully put it:

They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. -Psalm 36:8

I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom. -Matthew 26:29

Matthew Henry comments:

Dying saints take their leave of sacraments, and the other ordinances of communion which they enjoy in this world, with comfort, for the joy and glory they enter into supersede them all; when the sun rises, farewell the candles.

The Acts 15 deliberations bring joy every time I read them. The letter itself overflows with charity, brevity, and glad tidings:

22 Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsabbas, and Silas, leading men among the brothers, 23 with the following letter: The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings. 24 Since we have heard that some persons have gone out from us and troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, 25 it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, 26 men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27 We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. 28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: 29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.

In the movie Rembrandt, the painter (Charles Laughton) sits in a tavern with a group of men. How, his companions ask, can he stand to paint his wife Saskia all the time? Seven years of marriage, and still he paints Saskia! The discussion continues:

REMBRANDT: There was a man in the land of Uz and the Lord gave him all that the human heart could desire, but beyond all, this man was in love with his wife.

A MAN: He must have had a secret.

REMBRANDT: He had.

ANOTHER MAN: I’d like to know it!

REMBRANDT: He had a vision once. A creature half-child, half-woman, half-angel, half-lover brushed against him. And of a sudden he knew that when one woman gives herself to you, you possess all women. Women of every age and race and kind, and more than that, the moon, the stars, all miracles and legends are yours. Brown-skinned girls who inflame your senses with their play, cool yellow-haired women who entice and escape you, gentle ones who serve you, slender ones who torment you, the mothers who bore and suckled you; all women whom God created out of the teeming fullness of the earth, are yours in the love of one woman.

ANOTHER MAN: How?

REMBRANDT: Throw a purple garment lightly over her shoulders, and she becomes queen of Sheba. Lay your tousled head blindly upon her breast, and she is a Delilah, waiting to implore you. Take her garment from her, strip the last veil from her body, and she’s a chaste Susannah, covering her nakedness with flattering hands. Gaze upon her as you’d gaze upon a thousand strange women, but never call her yours, for her secrets are inexhaustible. You’ll never know them all! Call her by one name only. I call her Saskia.

One of my favorite native wildflowers, the showy ladyslipper orchid. It is such a joy to get down on one’s knees and enjoy the Creation!

What gets 15 feet tall, invades quickly, is hard to kill, and cause the kind of suffering that makes poison ivy seem nice by comparison? You guessed it: giant hogweed. Good grief, look at the size of this monster!

And this striking but scary alien is spreading into Ohio from Pennsylvania. There was an article in a NE Ohio paper last year about a man who found more than 100 of these things surrounding his barn, calling it “a forest of hogweed.” “I tried to kill them,” he said, “but you can’t destroy them.”

I don’t want to start a panic, but… Run for your lives!

All right, so it’s not another 1950s B movie. It’s just another oddity in God’s great big world.

PBS ran a documentary recently about the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. As usual with these kinds of shows, it focused on “clues” the voyage gives us about the origin of life. When watching nature shows, I always find it more interesting to disregard such pretentious balderdash and just ponder God’s hand in it all.

Saturn’s rings are a collection of ice particles, ranging from grains to barn-sized rocks, madly revolving around the great planet at speeds literally faster than a speeding bullet, violently colliding. Boom. Bang. God knows when each collision will occur. And all we see in pictures and our telescopes is the mysterious beauty of it all. In Lewis-speak, the rings invite us to look at the beam and along it.

The ephemeral bloodroot is blooming now in central Ohio. It’s springtime.

In St. Petersburg, we stayed at a hotel where, looking out a window, I could see one of Dosteovsky’s flats. Across the square lay majestic St. Isaac’s, commissioned by Alexander I. Not far away was Tchaikovsky’s apartment. Across a small park, the Bronze Horseman rears up along the Neva. A ten minute walk leads to the Winter Palace, seat of 200 years of Romanov rule and site of the final Bolshevik blow against the crumbling Provisional Government. Today it houses the famous Hermitage; locals and tourists wander about the large square below where many died in 1905. Who can understand the rhythms of Tsarist life, or the fear that reigned during the great siege of 1942, or Stalin’s terrors the decade before? Even in this recent city, born from 18th-century swamps, the past overwhelms.

Somewhere – I wish I remembered where – the late Shelby Foote noted that when it was still at Shiloh in early April, he could hear the yells of the boys in the wind whistling through the first growth on the trees. The history that he knew so intimately was alive. In some sense he communed with his forbears. How many have felt the same when peering at the crosses overlooking the windy sea at Normandy, or standing in the Gettysburg wheat field, or overlooking Rome from the Palatine Hill, or walking the grounds of Oxford, or a thousand other places including St. Petersburg?

And yet God’s glory, His weight, encompasses and far surpasses all of it combined. Who has known the mind of the Lord? (Rom 11:33-36)

One of the first things you learn as an amateur astronomer is that the view through your telescope is a lot different than the photographs in a book. A nebula that bursts with color on the page is a small white blotch in your telescope, even if your scope looks like this. Similarly, our unaided eyes see the Milky Way in summer as a long wispy cloud instead of the glorious profusion seen in astronomy magazines. This occurs for the same reason that a bright red car by day appears a shade of gray in the dark. Our little light-gatherers, aka. our eyes, just can’t stack up against long-exposure photography.

Far away from the city, the starry sky is, as Charlie Daniels put it, “like diamonds against black velvet.” And yet, the night sky is creation’s best illustration of how “we see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). It is as if God has placed a veil over a grand painting. But even in these shadowlands, the monochrome grandeur of the night sky is far more lovely than any creation of man. No wonder astronomers sometimes refer to the firmament as “the heavens.”

To give you an idea of how far away the nearest star (other than the Sun) is to earth, NASA notes that a car travelling 55 miles per hour would take 50 million (!) years to reach Proxima Centauri. The Voyager spacecraft left our solar system travelling at 37,000 miles an hour. It would take Voyager 80,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri and 40 billion years to reach the Andromeda galaxy.

There was an interesting show tonight on the Apollo 8 moon encounter. As amazing as it is to reflect see earth suspended 240,000 miles away in the black sea of space, consider that the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is ~100 million times further away from us than our own moon. A spec of light that takes around a second and a half to travel between earth and moon would take 4 years to travel to Proxima Centauri. And then consider that on a dark fall night in the country, you can see the Andromeda galaxy overhead, its hundreds of millions of stars just a dim fuzzball in our sky. It is 2 million light years away, ~500,000 times further than Proxima Centauri. And now astronomers are finding galaxies that are 13 billion light years away, 6000 times further away than the Andromeda galaxy.

Spend some time pondering this, because this shows God as He really is. “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.” (Ps 96:4).

For the Christian, heaven is where Jesus is. We do not need to speculate on what heaven will be like. It is enough to know that we will be for ever with Him. When we love anyone with our whole hearts, life begins when we are with that person; it is only in their company that we are really and truly alive. It is so with Christ. In this world our contact with Him is shadowy, for we can only see through a glass darkly. It is spasmodic, for we are poor creatures and cannot live always on the heights. But the best definition of it is to say that heaven is that state where we will always be with Jesus, and where nothing will separate us from Him any more. -William Barclay

“…The whole earth is full of His glory.” Is. 6:3

There is something strange, wondrous even, about a cat’s eyes. Look into them while they lazily stare, unblinkingly, at you, and you can see a glimpse of eternity. The Maker’s footprint is on all of His creation.