"Maturity is only a short break in adolescence." - Jules Feiffer

Check out their shadow.

The toilet is an under-appreciated metaphor for what’s wrong with life.
Think about it.
You fill it up with the worst, most disgusting stuff you’ve got. You can’t hardly look at it, never mind want anyone else to see it. It stinks. It defines gross.
Then you hit this little silver lever and...it disappears! Gone. Five minutes later you’ve forgotten about it, purged it from your consciousness as well as your body. Your wife complains about the odor left behind, but even that’s gone in 30 minutes...sooner if you use that aerosol can with the picture of daisies on it. One little lever, 2-3 pounds of downward pressure and all that disgustingness is gone forever inside of four seconds.

Now think about the last pile of disgusting you laid in life as we know it.
My point exactly!!!
It’s still with you because we don’t have any little silver lever for life. We can’t get rid of the you-know-what. I’m gonna bet you can still relive the horror and smell the stink from something you did back in Junior High School, never mind the stuff from last week. (I had diarrhea all through Jr. Hi.)
We need a silver lever for life - some way to flush miserable experiences from our memory and the memory of others. Instead, we carry it with us forever. OK, maybe not forever, but way too long.
Somebody, please invent a silver level for life.

I’m one of the old people who’s on Facebook. I like staying in touch with friends and family all over the world. What I wish I could block is the “Like” posts - the ones where a declarative statement from some page somewhere gets their “Like,” and I’m encouraged to join them by clicking “Like,” too.

“God still performs miracles every day. Click ‘Like’ if you agree.”

I wonder if the people who put that up know what a miracle is. A miracle is something more than a wonderful blessing from God. A miracle is, by definition, something outside the laws of nature that can only be explained by the sovereign work of God. In a miracle God intervenes in nature.
With that in mind, are the following miracles?

• The whale swallows Jonah and he lives (Jonah, not the whale.)
• The Red Sea divides, allowing Israel to pass through
• A crowd of over 5,000 is fed with five loaves and two fish.
• Abraham finds a ram caught in a thicket as he is about to kill his son, Isaac.

A miracle is more than just propitious timing. No question that God worked so that Pharaoh’s daughter went to the Nile River to bathe at the time and place the infant Moses had been hidden there. That was a work of God. It was not a miracle.
Hence, I would argue that God does NOT do miracles every day. Instead, they are extremely rare. He certainly does them (present tense verb), but by describing the work of God in everyday life, as he graciously controls timing and other circumstances, with the term miracles, we diminish the wonder of the real thing when it does occur.

So, as properly understood, have you ever witnessed a miracle?

Pam’s current issue of Good Housekeeping has a cover picture of Kelly Ripa with the text, “Fab at Forty.”
OK, let’s be fair. I want the next issue to have a picture of Barbi Benton with the text, “Sagging at Sixty.” (And if you are too young to know who Barbi Benton is - well - you’re too young.)

Aaron Rogers, QB for the Green Bay Packers, suffered a concussion on the team’s last offensive play yesterday. He got a sympathetic text message from former Packer QB, Brett Favre but Rogers was afraid to open it.
Wise decision, Aaron.

OK, that’s enough for tonight. See you on the 12th.