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HERE COMES LENT
Valentine’s Day is over and the pastel-colored Peeps are hitting the shelves of Walmart and Target. These are the most obvious signs that Easter is coming. It’s strange that even among Christians, the church calendar is a far less conspicuous time marker than the jellybeans and chocolate rabbits. Today is “Fat Tuesday” and Lent begins tomorrow with Ash Wednesday. The unfortunate reality is that Lent doesn’t get even as much press among Christians as Advent does. My church is hosting an Ash Wednesday service tomorrow – perhaps the first in its 190 years of history. I will be curious to…
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AWE
“Awe-Inspiring”: a term most often laced with generous amounts of hyperbole. Looking at my photos now, I realize the ones from a distance simply do not capture the magnitude of the falls. Look at this, for example:
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NEW MORNING
At the time of this writing, it is 6:00 am Ghana time, the morning of Thursday, February 12th. The sky lightens as the sun rises beyond the mountains to our East. (The other side of these mountains is Togo.) On our way back from seeing loan recipients in the North, we spent the night at Wli to check out the local waterfalls as a possible point of interest for the youth mission team I will be bringing to Africa in July. Here at the Water Heights Hotel, the yard guys are raking the grounds, and a hundred distant roosters can…
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DAILY BREAD
This coming Sunday I will be back in Indiana, God willing and the flights are on time. I have been preaching a series on the Lord’s Prayer recently, looking at each phrase in turn. So this week I am working on a sermon on “Give us this day our daily bread” – an interesting verse to ponder in the midst of extreme poverty. Each day here in Ghana, I am passing hundreds of people who know the experience of hunger intimately and literally. Many, no doubt, have endured more than an entire 24-hour period without bread to eat. And many…
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FOUR WAYS OF KNOWING
Are you familiar with the “four ways of knowing” as set forth by John Vervaeke? I haven’t done a lot of reading on this, but the concept seems incredibly important to me. Not just for faith matters, but for all sorts of thinking across all of life. According to Bing’s AI summary, the “four ways” are as follows: Propositional Knowing: This is the knowing we have in describing things or proclaiming facts, such as “the earth is round” or “I am human.” It is the most emphasized form of knowing in modern culture and is often used to facilitate other…
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CELEBRATION OF LIFE IN GHANA
Sometimes in the States we refer to a funeral as a “celebration of life”. If the memorial service I attended yesterday is at all representative, here in Ghana the phrase “celebration of life” is more than a euphemism. By all accounts, Dr. Lydia Nyador was an impressive woman and a servant of Christ. I met her on my first trip to Ghana 3 years ago. She and her husband Enoch graciously hosted me for a few nights. Yesterday’s memorial started at 3:00 in the afternoon. All the guests came dressed in black. Enoch wore a traditional robe, also in black. …
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GOD IS A MASTER NETWORKER
Dave, Emmanuel and I spent much of yesterday at the Mission Center, a building whose construction Mission Resource began in 2019 before being halted in 2020 by a court case – a dispute over who really owned the land before we bought it in 2010! As a result, the Mission Center stands half completed – walls and roof are in place, but no doors, windows, wiring, plumbing or furniture yet. It is more than enough to provide a glimpse of this location’s potential to be a meeting ground for Americans and Ghanaians and a hub for our loan work in…
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TRUE JOY AND TRUE SAFETY
I woke this morning to a hot and humid Ghanaian sunrise after nearly 9 hours of catch-up sleep. The jet lag was brutal yesterday after boarding the plane in New York Wednesday at 4:30 pm and landing in Africa at 2:00 am Indiana time. I napped a bit on that plane on and off, but no real sleep – so I was very thankful to have a comfortable bed last night. Dave, Emmanuel and I are staying in New Ningo at a beachside hotel called Coconut Pointe. I can’t complain! Yesterday when we checked in, though, I had the odd…
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TRIP ON WEDNESDAY
No time to write tonight. I leave tomorrow morning to spend 10 days in Ghana and there are still too many items on my list to complete. Unfortunately, it is turning out that the timing for this trip is not great. One of my church members is lying in hospice tonight – possibly his last night of earthly life. I hate to miss the funeral, but the family understands. Thankfully, two of Sardinia’s former pastors still live in Columbus and both are more than willing to step in while I am away. I would appreciate prayers for safe and productive…
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RIGHT NOW
Here’s a short and powerful illustration of the difference between proclaiming a “truncated gospel” (of “You’re a sinner but Jesus died for you so that you can go to heaven when you die if you just trust in Him”) and proclaiming the more robust biblical gospel of the Kingdom. It’s a paraphrase of something YouTuber Kevin Thompson said in one of his videos: I used to evangelize by asking people, “Do you know where you are going when you die?” Now I want to ask people, “Do you know where you are going IN THIS LIFE right now?”