IT’S ONLY WORDS - REALLY?

I love to read and am thrilled when a picture jumps out from the pages.

Jack Reacher, in Lee Child’s The Affair, was riding on a bus. “The bus ride was magnificent, in its way. Not a radical distance, no more than a small portion of the giant continent, no more than an inch on a one-page map, but it took six hours.”

Are you ready? The next sentence made my imagination jump. “The view out the window changed so slowly it seemed never to change at all, but even so the landscape at the end of the journey was very different than at the beginning.”

OH MY GOSH! Can you say: Description of life? Day by day, our lives don’t seem so different. Get up. Get dressed. Go to work/work at home. Eat supper. Watch the same show we watched the week before. Go to bed. Get up.----- And it starts all over again. Each day a repeat of the day before.

It’s funny but we don’t notice the slight differences. A day is less than an inch on our travel through life. But one day, we realize our lives have changed. We realize our hair is grey. When did that happen? We realize our children have grown up. When did that happen? We realize those people we went to school with are old. When did that happen? One day we realize we are at a different place than where we began. And we wonder, “When did that happen?”

Have you read The Shack? I have, at least three times. C. Baxter Kruger, Ph.D. has written The Shack Revisited. Dr. Kruger tells about being twelve years old, lost and separated from his parents after a football game in New Orleans. He took the trolley, trying to find where they had parked the car. The streetcar made a complete roundtrip and the driver said, “Son, we have made the circuit. What do you want to do?”

Dr. Kruger called this the “Scared to Death” streetcar. “We don’t know who we are or why we are here, or what’s going to happen next.” OH MY GOSH! Been there, done that.

How often do we get lost and just don’t know what to do? Some give up. Some sleep. Some stay busy. Some pretend. But we are scared. We keep “looking out the trolley window hoping to see something that will give us a hint of home, of hope, of peace.”

Yes, I just love it when words jump off the page and into my imagination, into my heart, into my soul.

AND NOW

Read a book. Find those special words that stir your very soul and cause your imagination to soar. Soak them in.

Read the Bible. God has filled it with images that will cause your imagination to explode and open your eyes to wonders that were hidden.

Imagine this: Isaiah 6:1 -3-- I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

Read the Bible. God has filled it with special words that will not only stir your soul, but save it.

Hold onto these words. John 3:16 -- For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

LET US PRAY (Please use this as a beginning of your prayer. Finish in your own words, words from your heart.)

Lord Almighty, I can close my eyes and see your robe flowing from heaven, to my feet. I can hear the seraphs calling, “Holy, holy, holy.” I read that you gave Your Son for me and humbly accept this gift of eternal life. Amen