Among the things I am grateful for on this Thursday morning is the prolific publicity coming Woodward Park's way. In the current issue of the Christian Chronicle, there is a neat picture of David Lock baptizing his son Scott during last month's Yosemite Bible Camp with an accompanying paragraph about the camp.
Yesterday, I received an email request for pictures of our downtown/homeless outreach from a publisher for Homecoming Magazine, the journal of Bill & Gloria Gaither. Barbara McCreary attended a Gaither concert earlier this year and had her name drawn to receive a "Give It Away" gift she was to pay forward. She chose to give the money in her gift toward our downtown/homeless outreach and Homecoming Magazine has chosen to highlight her donation with the story, including pictures, of our ongoing downtown outreach to the homeless of Fresno.
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One of the lasting images in my mind from the 3-day speaking tour in Madera was the shirt little Luke was wearing on Monday night.
"I tried to be good," the shirt said, "but I got bored."
Funny, but the more I thought about that proverb -- as Luke made his way up and down the center aisle during the Monday evening puppet skit -- the more I realized that it told an accurate tale of the lives of many adult disciples of Jesus.
Why do we dally with sin? Why do we lurk in places and spaces we have no business going? We do we venture into uncharted waters, only to discover the consequential winds and waves are more than we bargained for?
Could it be we simply got bored? Could it be we took the majestic for granted?
1 Corinthians 10 recounts the plight of the Israelites on their journey to Canaan. Despite the majestic manifestation of God at every turn, it seems as though his children got bored.
The miraculous became mundane.
Consequently, God's children fell into all manner of vile and disgusting sin, abominable acts that betrayed the brilliance to which they'd been privy.
Paul says their stories were recorded as "examples to teach us." And one of the things they teach me is that little Luke's shirt, while altogether intended to be a witty truism about the two-year old inside the shirt, is true: boredom -- or taking for granted the majestic God blesses us with everyday -- keeps us from being good.
