like a jumbler, only less puzeylier

Wow, there has been a butt-load of stuff on my mind. (Yes, literally, the measure of the mass of thoughts mulling inside my head is a metric butt-load.) Not the least of which is the blessings in my life that God has provided me with, but that's for another time and another blog post. In the interest of some of the readers out there (you know who you are), I'll try to make this and subsequent posts as brief as I can. The potential problem with this is that the following thoughts might get a little sticky to dig through.

• At the Good Friday Service (April 10th), I started thinking about some spiritual matters. In this case, I was looking at the parallel between Isaac from the Old Testament (Genesis 22) and Jesus Christ from the New Testament. God asks Abraham (Isaac's father) to sacrifice Isaac on a mountaintop. Abraham is torn, for obvious reasons...and not only is Isaac his son, but he represents a miracle that God did to allow Abraham to even be a father. Why would God ask him to kill his miracle son? When Isaac asks his father what's going on, and what the sacrifice will be, Abraham says, "The Lord will provide". (For those who don't know how the story ends, as Abraham prepares to do the deed, God sends an angel to tell Abraham not to sacrifice him, because it was just a test.) In the Gospel books, Jesus Christ is revealed as the new provision for us...a sacrifice in our place.
  
• Another random thought was that I should try to write a song about the approximately three hours Christ spent on the cross with God turning His back on him. I mean, what enormity of anguish must he have been going through to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Incidentally, I've recently discovered a great chord progression: G to D to Em to C to D>G
  
• When we take communion (as in the bread and grape juice passed around in church), it represents two things. 1) We crush the bread in our mouths, just as God crushes our sin out of our bodies—I think of it like a wine press, crushing the grapes so that only the layer of skin remains. 2) We let the fruit of the vine wash through us, just as God took the blood (our life) and created new beings out of us, free of the control of sin. So, as it says in II Corinthians 5:17, the old has gone, the new has come—you are a new creation. Back to the grape analogy, God crushes the evil out of us, and then refills us with His own powerful and mighty blood.
  
• This is something I shared at Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship several Tuesdays ago, along with a verse from the song you all know, "Amazing Grace":

  'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
  And grace my fears relieved
  The Lord has brought me safe thus far
  And He will lead me home

  God has redeemed each one of us, and has made us His children, and part of a family that can never be separated. Not by the enemy, not by fear, not by power, not even by hate itself...His love shall never fail.
  

Wow, I still have about two blogs' worth of thoughts swarming around inside my mind. (I'd say that's approximately 2/3 of a metric butt-load.) Stay tuned for more hopefully better-organized thoughts soon!

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Author's note: There is something very soothing about drinking a cold glass of Ovaltine with a sore throat. You don't have any? Please, just ask me, and I'll get you some...I have so much RDA to use up!