Ever wonder what God’s “State of the Union” would be?  The President addressed both houses of Congress and the nation Monday evening, delivering his seventh and final State of the Union address.  Fifty-three minutes of speech interrupted seventy times by applause—both partisan and bipartisan.

Aren’t you glad God isn’t like the stock market?  What a ride this week is turning out to be for investors the world over!  The unraveling mortgage crisis here in the U.S.

Details, details—they really do make a difference, don’t they?

“The Church of the Non-Believers.”  The title would catch anybody’s eye.  A few months ago Janine Lim, our webmaster, sent me an issue of Wiredmagazine carrying this cover story (11-06).

Sitting in my snowbound study a day before the much ballyhooed Iowa caucuses, I wonder what difference it all makes in the end.  True, the New Year has dawned, fresh and snow-blown with promise.  And the adventure of a journey uncharted looms large and inviting.  But Iowa’s unrelenting stream of political sound bites that has been our daily fare for months now (and we live in Michigan!) will in a few hours crescendo into deafening campaign noise from New Hampshire and South Carolina and the rest of the compacted primary states eagerly awaiting their turn in the national spo

According to the CIA World Factbook (proof, I suppose, that spy agencies have a positive role to play on earth), around 27% of the world’s population is under 15 years of age.  And according to the constantly escalating World Population Clock, at the time of this writing earth had 6,638,512,622 inhabitants.  Which means that approximately 1.7 billion residents of this planet are under 15.  Twenty percent of them live in China, 17 % in India, and 4.6% of them are here in the United States. What’s that have to do with Christmas and the approaching of a new year?  Bey

I’d like to share with you three new ways you can partner with me in reaching this generation for Christ through cyberspace, television and the radio.   If you are one of the hundreds of people who read my blog each week, or one of the thousands of people who subscribe to the sermon podcasts, you may be willing to consider one of the following three levels of support for this ministry as the Sprit leads and you are able:

It’s like the Grinch who stole Christmas.  That was the observation of Sheriff Kent Harris in explaining the actions of a thief who struck Danny Tipton’s Christmas tree farm in eastern Tennessee a few days ago.  Tipton specializes in taller Fraser firs preferred by businesses and churches and homes with higher ceilings, Christmas trees usually ten to twelve feet tall.  Tipton sells his firs for $100 each.  But a thief or band of thieves raided the Tipton farm sometime between Thanksgiving and last week and lopped off the top six feet of two dozen of his prize Fraser firs, 

If only that three-way handshake meant the answer to the Christmas song! How many times has the world witnessed the leaders of Israel, the Palestinian people and the United States clasp hands in a renewed pledge to seek peace in the Holy Land. Three nations, three religions, one prayer. Still unanswered.

I'm reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s award-winning new book, Mayflower, an “electrifying new history” of America’s “most sacred national myth”—the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of the Plymouth Colony. Blending the dispassion of an historian with the dramatic flair of a story-teller, this account is the most detailed and gripping Pilgrim chronicle I have read.