Q. What's the difference between a female lawyer and a pit bull? A. Lipstick.
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If you stop believing what your professor told you had to be true and if you start thinking for yourself you may come to some conclusions you hadn't expected. You may find the Bible makes more sense than you thought or were told to think. Allow yourself to be ruined, ruined with regard to what you always thought could be true. Can you believe what you don't understand? You and I believe everyday what we don't understand unless it comes to the issue of salvation. - - - Dr. Woodrow Kroll
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A telephone rang. "Hello! Is your phone number 444-4444?"
"Yes, it is," came the reply.
"Thank goodness! Could you call 911 for me? I super-glued my finger to the phone."
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By the grace given me I say to everyone of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. --Romans 12
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I thought about how mothers feed their babies with little tiny spoons and forks so I wonder what Chinese mothers use. Perhaps toothpicks?
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The union workers at the Federal Mint went on strike today.
They are demanding to make less money!
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Hear about the UNC student who.............................?
* Got excited because she finished a jigsaw puzzle in six months. The box had said "2 to 4 years."..........?
* Was trapped on an escalator for hours when the power went out...........?
* Couldn't call 911 because there was no 11 on any phone button...........?
A powerful story emerged from the bombing raids of World War II where thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. After experiencing the fright of abandonment, many of these children were rescued and sent to refugee camps where they received food and shelter. Yet even in the presence of good care, they had experienced so much loss that many of them could not sleep at night. They were terrified they would awake to find themselves once again homeless and hungry. Nothing the adults did seemed to reassure them, until someone thought to send a child to bed with a loaf of bread. Holding onto bread, the children were able to sleep. If they woke up frightened in the night, the bread seemed to remind them, "I ate today, and I will eat again tomorrow."(1)
I love this story and the image it sets boldly in my mind. But I first heard it as a young woman in the throes of an eating disorder, and I just could not relate. For a growing number of lives around the world, the thought of bread is far from a source of comfort. Eating disorders are a rapidly escalating epidemic no longer thought to be solely an American phenomenon. According to one psychologist, "[R]eports have emerged of an increased incidence of eating disorders in the Middle East, Africa, India, and various countries in southern Asia, including Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and South Korea."(2) For many individuals, the thought in the night that they will face food again in the morning is terrifying.
There was a time long after recovery in a clinical sense of the word, when fear of food was still what centered me. I realized this in my aggrieved reaction to a seminary professor's pronouncement. "Heaven is a feast," he said in class, "and God is the one preparing it." Later he added a similarly troubling thought, "The image of the banquet is central to our communing with God." His words were hurtful, largely because I knew they were right. The table is intricately connected with the faith we profess in remembrance of Christ. The call of God is resounding: "Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find" (Matthew 22:9).
However we approach the rich imagery of biblical language, the images of table, banquet, and feast are clearly intended to bring something powerful to mind. As the psalmist writes, "The poor will eat and be satisfied... All the rich of the earth will feast and worship!" (Psalm 22:26, 29). But in my understanding of God's house and envisioning of heaven, food was exactly what I had been trying to avoid. To commune over food with people, much less at the table of God, was something that expended everything within me. The table was a symbol of stress and discipline, a daily battle from which I wanted to be released--not invited. Yet how often God invites us to face the one thing we cannot, the very thing that brings us to surrender. God prepares a table in the presence of our enemies, and at times the enemy is us.
Though I had convinced myself that food would one day be a problem fully behind me--even if this meant waiting for eternity--God seemed to be shouting an invitation to the table today. My presence was requested at the banquet; I was invited to the feast. It was an invitation that startled and confused me. It drove away the hope to which I cleaved on bad days and woke up with each morning: God doesn't care about food; He doesn't care about my battle with it. But one day it will be no more. This lie He graciously purged from my altar. Slowly, cautiously, my eyes were opened to life and the Last Supper, to healing and his Word.
On the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and broke it and gave it to those he loved. Holding onto him, like children with bread, we are given peace in uncertainty, mercy in brokenness, something solid when all is lost. In his severe mercy, we are invited to the table: Come, take and eat.
Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Dennis Linn, Sleeping with Bread (New York: Paulist, 1995), 1. (2) Richard Gordon, Eating Disorders: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 80.
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