Tidbits: Reformation Day.

October 31st is called Reformation Sunday in the Lutheran church. It is the day, historically, when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the doors of the Catholic Church, which was the thing that really seemed to kick-start the protestant Reformation. To honour this (as I am a Lutheran), I thought I would put some of Martin Luther's quotes up, the ones that I find particularly special, and just, you know, comment on them. Like I do.

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"Even though I am a sinner and deserving of death and hell, this shall nonetheless be my consolation and my victory that my Lord Jesus lives and has risen so that He, in the end, might rescue me from sin, death, and hell."
I find that the most beautiful thing about Christianity is that we are sinners and so undeserving of love that really, God should just throw his hands in the air and give up on us. But he doesn't. He just keeps on believing in us again and again and again.

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"God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars."
I read a story one time about a monk who spent his entire life trying to find God. In his old age, he was in the midst of despair because of his lifetime of dedication when all of a sudden, a leaf blew in front of him. Then all of a sudden he realized that the leaf... it was God. The trees, the water, the very ground that he sat on, every object around him, everything was God. And that news made him so happy that he got up and he just danced.
God is certainly found in nature, and all around us. I can feel it every time I watch the sun set or feel the breeze brush against my skin.

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"If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there."

This is my last, and my favourite. Who wants to live somewhere that you can't experience joy?

I believe that in heaven, there will be laughing and joy, dancing and singing. It'll be the merriest party we've ever seen, and it will be made the merriest by the presence of our Heavenly Father.

~Godspede

Another comic for the day

I have another comic I'd like to share. The website, once again, is not a religious website. The artist simply happens to occasionally draw things that are religious. And again, this comic is more often then not dirty, and it usually contains swears. The name of the site is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and it updates daily (even on weekends!)
This particular comic isn't really what I'd consider funny. It just made me blink then smile, softly. It rings pretty close to home.

The URL is: http://www.smbc-comics.com

Link to comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1851

And here it is (Warning, it's long):


~Godspede

Tidbits: Let My Words Be Few

I find it easier to concentrate on homework if I have music playing around me, so today as I wrote a paper on English I had a playlist on Youtube of Christian songs. When one song came on I happened to glance at it and saw an incredibly long post by the creator of the video. I decided to read it, and I thought I'd share it with you. The link to the video is at the bottom of this post, and if you click on the title of this post it'll bring you there (note: if you have a Windows and hold the ctrl-key while clicking the title, it'll pop it up on a new tab/window) (note #2: I've fixed his/her typos, and only the ones that are possible to "fix" without changing the meaning of his/her post).

Music video slide show created and inspired by the beautiful Christian worship song Let My Words Be Few by Phillips, Craig & Dean. I couldn't sleep very well one night this past week so I decided to peruse the Internet while at the same time listening to the Christian music radio station. I came across something online that peaked by interest. What I was viewing were actual photos from the NASA Hubble telescope. One of the photos was that of a nebula in our galaxy. A nebula is a large and colorful conglomeration of gas, dust and other matter that can be several light years in size. A nebula is what occurs prior to the birth of a new star. The short description next to the photo stated that this nebula was so far away that the image snapped by the Hubble telescope took place 3,000 years before Jesus was born on earth. The attached article went on to explain that our Milky Way galaxy is nearly 100,000 light years across. In other words if we could travel at the speed of light, or 186,000 miles per second, it would take 100,000 years to cross it. If you do the math, that is 586,971,360,000,000,000. For the record, that's 586 quadrillion, 971 trillion, 360 billion miles across. And within our own galaxy, the nearest sun to our sun is 4 light years way, which is a "mere" 25 trillion miles. And we are only talking about the Milky Way galaxy, not to mention the hundreds or even thousands galaxies around it.

God is so incredible and so awesome we can barely comprehend how big He really is. But God didn't create just things that are incredibly huge. As we all know, all matter is made up of incredibly tiny particles. As early as the 1800's, scientists believed that molecules were the smallest structures in the universe. They were able to see them with a regular microscope. But by the end of that century they realized that molecules were made up of even smaller particles called atoms. Atoms cannot be seen by any typical microscope, it requires an electron microscope. So just how small is an atom? If you lined up the atoms in a straight line on a period printed on this page it would take 2 million atoms to cross the diameter of that period. And if that is not incomprehensible enough, today we know that there are particles that are thousands of times smaller inside the atom. For example the neutron, a particle located inside the atom, is 10,000 times smaller than the atom.

Again, God is so incredible and so awesome we can barely understand how significant He really is. During His creation, God was the ultimate chemist, physicist, astronomer, and biologist. He was most certainly an artist, a maker of all of our world's and universe's beauty. He was the lawmaker of all of the unseen forces that make "nature" orderly and predictable. The universe as it exists was not produced by some cosmic accident. I know with all my heart that the conditions of creation were intricately planned and considered. A mindless uncontrolled "big bang" would result in destruction and chaos, not the life and order we now see. Thus God created the big and the small, so incredibly big and so infinitely small that is difficult to describe or comprehend it.

The most amazing thing to me is that as small and insignificant we truly are relative to the size and complexity of the entire universe that God created, the Bible tells us that what the Lord wants most is a relationship with each and everyone of us and that He is there for us at all times, if only we will reach out to Him. And if we conclude that God truly is the maker of all things huge and small as described previously, then why do we have difficulty surrendering our will to him? Are we so blind or arrogant to think that our problems, our hurts, our habits or our hang-ups are too big or too complicated for God?

That evening as I was looking at the photos of the stars, planets and galaxies and researching related articles, a song came on the radio called Let My Words Be Few. One of the verses in that song hit me like a lightning bolt: "I Stand in Awe of You". That is exactly how I felt at that very moment; that is, how awesome God really is. This backdrop was the inspiration for the following music video that I created that night using real photos that I found on the Internet and that beautiful song, Let My Words Be Few performed by the Christian group Phillips, Craig & Dean. It was totally God-inspired. True to the title of the song, the lyrics are indeed simple and few. But that may be the best way to describe how we should feel and act when we come to pray and humble ourselves to our wonderful creator. He truly is our Alpha and Omega. It doesn't get any simpler than that. To Him, I stand in awe.
                                                                                                        --HaitiMissionary

http://youtu.be/12z4dvc2kjo


~Godspede

Visions: Nails

Note: I had to climb a tree to get this picture. I was higher than the roof of my boathouse. Appreciate it.

When one of my older brothers was a preteen, he didn't want to build a treehouse; he wanted to just put platforms in a tree so that it still had that adrenaline feeling of being in a tree, but had the stability and comfort to stay up there for a while. These platforms went way high up in the tree, higher than he'd ever be able to climb without them.
When my younger brother and I became old enough to climb trees, we naturally loved these platforms. The only problem is that since my older brother is my elder by six years, these platforms had become pretty unstable---they had only been made out of chipboard. So my trusty little brother borrowed a hammer from my dad and knocked off the boards, which were mostly rotten. He tried to pull out the nails but they were stuck fast. And every time I see the nails, I can't help but hear the voice in my head label them as a "nail in the tree".

Tidbits: Promises

On the bulletin board in my kitchen, there's a little poem that's been there for as long as I can remember. A few years ago my mom got me to retype it, as it was so old and so punctured by thumbtacks that it was falling apart. I typed it to be exactly the same as it had been before, down to the little picture of the Trinity that was beside it, and I thought it was appropriate to share here.

God has not promised skies always blue,
Flower-strewn pathways all our life through.
God has not promised sun without rain,
Day without sorrow; peace without pain.

But God has promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labour, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.


 ~Godspede