My favorite character in literature is Father Zossima, the saintly old monk who forms the spiritual center of gravity in Dostoyevsky’s last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. On his deathbed, in the climactic scene of the first half of the book, Zossima reflects in the following words on his childhood and on the biblical story of Job:
What’s your favorite potato chip? Mine is Miss Vicky’s lime and black pepper. Does this matter? Absolutely! Sometimes little things can make the difference between connecting with God, or not.
People like to ask, “What kind of a God lets little children suffer?” Really they are asking, “What kind of a God lets children suffer before they are even old enough to know the comfort of faith?”
When you read a great book, you can’t wait to share it with everyone. Such a book is “The Unmistakable Hand of God” by Roy Comrie. Roy is one of the great missionaries, and missionary encouragers, of our time.
Here’s one of my favorite parables by Hans Christian Andersen, as translated by Jean Hersholt:
“God has made me his target; his archers surround me.” (Job 16:12)
In Renaissance art one of the most commonly portrayed martyrdoms was that of St. Sebastian. The sight of this great lover of God with his body riddled with bloodied arrows is a shocking one, as the artists intended it to be. Yet how much more shocking it is to state, as Job does, that God Himself is the cruel archer who so tortures His own saints to death.
Dale Ahlquist has written an excellent one-volume introduction to G.K. Chesterton called The Apostle of Common Sense. Here’s just an excerpt on GKC as prophet:Continue reading
“We write this to make our joy complete.” ~1 John 1:4
Like John in this verse, I too wrote a book—called Champagne for the Soul—with the motive of completing my joy by sharing it. Happiness, oddly enough, can be a lonely business, because so few people share one’s joy.
If only there were someone to arbitrate between us,
to lay his hand upon us both,
someone to remove God’s rod from me,
so that his terror would frighten me no more. (Job 9:33-4)
My Christmas story this year is an excerpt from my current project, a novel about angels. Usually we view the Annunciation from Mary’s point of view. But how would the angel Gabriel have experienced it? Read on.