The Baldwin Hills dam was built on a steep hillside in Southern California overlooking a packed residential community. It was considered an architectural wonder, at least by its designers. It also rested squarely on an earthquake fault. The designers insisted that the fault line would not affect their structure. Nestled away on a hillside, where it would not interfere with development, it served as a storage facility for the waters that follow in the form of rain and snow melt. Then, on December 14, 1963, ...
In some ways life hasn’t treated you like you wish it had, right? All the childhood dreams have not been fulfilled, have they? Some friends have been lost along the way. Beloved family members are gone. Maybe family life hasn’t been quite what we’d hoped. The job’s not all we thought it would be. You name it. For all of us life hasn’t turned out just the way we had planned. Life is not like the prosperity gospel preachers have promised.[1] God has not delivered on what they promised. He has not seemed to ...
... the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (vv.23-26). The story of the institution of the Lord’s ...
Christianity is all about salvation — the salvation of our souls, right? That’s why the church needs to keep its nose out of politics and all this stuff about polluting the environment. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that nearly 1 in 2 of us (47%) feels this way about the church keeping out of politics. And a 2017 poll by Pew found that just over 1 in 2 of us (55%) rank ecological destruction as a major problem. We have had a president who does not want Americans to do much about it (such as Trump’s ...