Bible at Home

About five weeks ago I walked across the street to our neighbor’s house and asked her if she would be willing to teach me to play the violin, enough so that I could play Christmas carols by next December. I had once taken lessons and been able to play, but in the many years since,…

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for the want of wonder.” GK Chesterton, 1920 Palm Sunday was a wonder that is celebrated more than two thousand years after it took place. Little did the people at the first Palm Sunday imagine that their efforts to honor the man on the…

Whenever I read the story of the child Samuel in the first book of his name, I experience the phenomenon of tears running down my cheeks at the scene at night of the young boy running to Eli to say, “Here I am. You called me.” (1Samuel 3: 1-10) It took three trips to Eli…

One winter day my sister Nancy, a kindergarten teacher in central New York State, needed to walk to a storage building behind the school. When she entered, she was surprised to find some 20 or more snow sleds stacked in the shed. That afternoon she asked her principal why they were there. She was told…

Probably the most vivid and inexplicable example of faith in the Bible, next to the example of Noah, is that of Abraham, who believed beyond reason that Sarah, his elderly wife, would bear Abraham a son in his own old age. Even though he believed God, Abraham and Sarah contrived to provide a proxy son…

Manoah, the father of Samson, was terrified when he realized that the “holy man” who had spoken to him was, in fact an angel of God: ”we are doomed to die!” he said to his wife. “We have seen God,!” But his wife answered, “If the Lord meant to kill us, He would not have…

Nancy, my oldest sister was a competitive swimmer and diver in high school. For one or two summers she taught swimming to children in the community pool. Her first summer she struggled to keep their attention until one day Nancy came home all smiles. She announced at dinner that she had discovered that praising the…

Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado is fascinating to visit. It is a fairly large community of buildings made from six to ten hundred years ago by a people who did not have so much as a wheel of any kind. They built their structures of local stone carved by the use of another stone…

When we bought our house over eleven years ago, it had a beautiful ornamental pear tree in the front yard. For most of those years we enjoyed the tree mightily, until about four years ago in a storm it cracked and had to be cut the rest of the way down. I grieved for the…

When they brought my new-born brother home from the hospital, my parents lived in an upstairs apartment in a small New York State town. The baby, Burr, was their first born. One day soon after bringing him home, Mildred, my mother, put him down in his crib after feeding him, softly closed the door, and…