Psalm 104 v 24.How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. A tiny bird, the lesser white-throat warbler, summers in Germany and winters in Africa. As the days grow short, the adult birds head south, leaving their little ones behind. Several weeks later, the young fly…

Mark 6 v 46. After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray When a whitewater raft guide shouts, “Eddy out!” he doesn’t mean, “Throw someone called Edward out of the boat.” It’s a command for the people on one side to hold their paddles against the current while the others stroke. This…

1 Peter 5 v 7.Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.Isaac Page tells the story of a poor man in Ireland who was plodding along toward home, carrying a huge sack of potatoes. A horse and wagon came along and the driver stopped to give him a ride. The man accepted and…

Matthew 8 v 27.The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” Ocean waves can be awesome in size and power. Sailors have measured waves at 60 feet, higher than most houses. In 1933 the Navy tanker Ramapo was hit by a wave 112…

Books! Books! Books! Hardcovers and paperbacks. Reference works and joke books. Romantic novels and mysteries. Self-help books and religious publications. They just keep appearing and we keep buying them. We also keep writing them. No wonder Solomon said, “Of making many books there is no end “(Eccl. 12 v 12). Jill Briscoe was addressing a…

Psalm 136 v 1.Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever. You don’t have to live long in this world before it becomes painfully clear that nothing lasts forever. The car you were so proud of when you bought it is spending too much time in the garage getting fixed. Those clothes…

Psalm 1 v 3.That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in seasonand whose leaf does not wither-whatever they do prospers. People who don’t want to wait 4 decades for a globe Norway maple to grow in their front garden can buy a 30 foot specimen from a nursery for £30,000. A 50…

Philippians 2 v 9.Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name What’s in a name? Plenty, according to Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays, authors of the book The Language of Names. In the section of their book where they discuss literary names, Kaplan and Bernays point…

Romans 2 v 10.but glory, honour and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.According to the book “Life of Francis d’Assisi”, Francis once invited a young monk to join him on a trip to town to preach. Honoured to be given the invitation, the monk readily accepted. All…

As a young man, Joseph Scriven had been engaged to a woman he deeply loved. But tragedy struck the night before their wedding when the boat she was in capsized and she drowned. In the hope of forgetting the shock, which he never did, Joseph left his home in Ireland and went to Canada.  There he…