Are you ever so fearful or anxious about something that you lose sleep about it? Are there things out of your control that you toss and turn over? Maybe it’s so bad that you even cry. If you’re like this, you’re definitely not alone, and in fact, King David struggled with this kind of anxiety.
In Psalm 56, David laments that his enemies are constantly out to get him, and then in verse 8, David wrote about God:
“You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?”
What David means is that God sees all of our anxiety and every detail about how it affects us. He counts every time we toss and turn at night. He counts every tear you cry, and keeps track of them all, because he cares.
This realization causes David to write in verses 10 and 11:
“In God, whose word I praise, in the LORD, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me?”
Prayer or any religious practice won’t always cure anxiety, but as long as we suffer, God knows and cares about it. We can trust Him to provide for us, sometime between now and eternity.
As Paul wrote about the glory of our salvation:
“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”[1]
What comes to mind when you think of Old Testament priests? Fancy robes? Their handling of sacrifices? Their separation to service of Yahweh? The corrupt priests Jesus later confronted in the New Testament?
What we sometimes forget is that everything the Old Testament priests did was done to allow God to be present with and bless His people, as a preview of how Christ makes us acceptable to God so He can live in us. In Numbers 6, God commands Aaron and his sons to proclaim this blessing to the people of Israel:
“The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”[1]
John Calvin makes this comment on the blessing: “This doctrine is especially profitable, that believers may confidently assure themselves that God is reconciled to them, when He ordains the priests to be witnesses and heralds of His paternal favor towards them. The word to bless is often used for to pray for blessings, which is the common duty of all pious persons; but this rite…was an efficacious testimony of God’s grace; as if the priests bore from His own mouth the commandment to bless.”
May we be blessed today by our Lord, whose face shines like the sun and whose grace gives us peace!
Actual disaster footage. Viewer discretion advised.
A doctor friend of mine said there’s an inside joke that “if you put two bones alone in a room together, they’ll find each other.” I heard this after breaking my left collarbone in the summer of 2011. Even when I was young, I wasn’t a great athlete, but I did always hustle. So after a decade of not doing much athletically, I joined my work softball league and thought at least I would try hard and have fun. But when I hit a weak ground ball to the shortstop and decided to “hustle,” disaster saw its opportunity. The fields we played on were poorly maintained, with holes where the hitters stand. Instead of doing the smart thing and stopping after I tripped in this hole, I tried to keep running (because hustle!) and soon ended up falling hard on my shoulder with a loud snapping sound. The picture above is my actual X-ray from that night.
This isn’t a great memory, but it’s also a reminder of the miracle of healing. I had the option of surgery or just letting it grow back together, and I chose letting it heal. However, it didn’t “just” get fixed. It was by design and no accident.
My collarbone was broken clean through, with the two sides of the bone not even touching any more. I could feel them moving around independently. When I think about the millions of “decisions” the cells in these bones, interacting with the tissue around them, had to make to do something they’ve never done before, I have to be convinced something beyond my own anatomy and genetic history was at work. An impersonal evolution may have never seen these bones break in just this way before, so how did the bones know what to do? I certainly wasn’t aware of telling these bones what to do. They didn’t “just” fix themselves.
I can only credit the creative power of my Maker, along with David, who wrote: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” – Psalm 139:13-14
Everyday Miracles Miracles happen every single day in every human body, yet we often miss them or refuse to call them miracles. Maybe we do that because calling them miracles would mean we have to give credit to the power behind the miracle, and we’d rather not. Ever since Adam and Eve looked at God’s good creation and decided they’d rather make their own decisions, mankind has persisted in acting like bones that would rather grow apart than follow their Creator’s design. As a result, the world is broken into billions of personalities that don’t know how to connect, that don’t know how to knit agape love into the trillions of decisions they make, and interactions they have, each day.
We all have a choice in every moment: do we “just” do whatever we think is best and expect the right outcome to “just” happen, or do we look at nature and think that maybe the Person who knows how to make bones fix themselves knows how to guide our lives to the best outcome.
Our heavenly Father wants to knit us together once again, in a world that isn’t broken and where we aren’t broken. None of us are beyond repair, and our Maker will restore us if we let Him. Every human being in history has been bad at love, except One, and He is calling to every one of us to trust Him. “Just Do It” is not a good motto.
“Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” – Psalm 34:19-20
Here is the list of readings for this week: 2 chapters to read per day as the main reading plan, and extra chapters for anyone who wants to read the whole Bible in 2025. Reading 3 chapters a day on weekdays and 4 on weekends almost exactly covers the 1,189 chapters of the Bible, so the “extra” readings are about 9 chapters per week.
Follow along (or not) any way you choose!
Monday, July 7: Numbers 9-10 Tuesday, July 8: Numbers 11-12 Wednesday, July 9: Numbers 13-14 Thursday, July 10: Numbers 15-16 Friday, July 11: Numbers 17-18 Saturday, July 12: Numbers 19-20 Sunday, July 13: Numbers 21-22
Additional readings if you want to read the whole Bible this year: Isaiah 33 – 41
In June – July of 2022, we took a 12-day family trip to the UK and it’s a trip I appreciate more and more as time passes. Our days were packed with activities, and I can’t write about them all, but here are some the best memories, in the order we did them. I’m writing this post in response to a prompt on WordPress: “Describe your most memorable vacation.”
After landing at Heathrow on the morning of June 27th, we drove our rental car to Oxford and did a tour of Christ Church college. Having only a few hours, we chose this one college since some of the Hogwarts campus in the Harry Potter movies was based on it. There’s a distinctive stairwell there that appeared in some of the films, and the Great Hall here inspired the dining hall in Hogwarts (the one with all the floating candles). What I didn’t realize until visiting Christ College was that Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a student here and much of his “Alice in Wonderland” world and characters were based on his experience here. Some of the stained glass in the Great Hall features his characters.[1]
On our second day, the family split up and my son and I, who love going to amusement parks together, went to Alton Towers, the premier park in the UK. We love roller coasters, and my son was really grateful that we prioritized this, even choosing the house we rented based on how close it was to the park. The highlight of the day was riding The Smiler, the coaster with the most inversions (14) in the world, 3 times. Our son wore a T shirt that day listing some coaster manufacturers, and The Smiler checked off the last one listed on the shirt, Gerstlauer.
A view from our day on Mount Snowdon.
Day 3 was our only day spent outside of England. We did a road trip to Wales, and this ended up being my daughter’s favorite day of the trip. On a friend’s recommendation, we took a train up Mount Snowdon, the tallest mountain in Wales, but unfortunately due to construction we were only able to go ¾ of the way up the mountain. The train stopped there, and we spent ½ hour walking around before heading back down. The views were amazing! I’ve written another blog post about how beautiful and green this mountain was, which you can read here.
On the fifth day, on our way from our rental house in the country to our rental in a London suburb, we spent the afternoon in Bath, England, one of my favorite cities. My wife and I visited there once before, and we were glad to come back and share it with the kids. We toured the old Roman baths, which I wrote about in this blog post, and also had afternoon tea in the “Pump Room.” It’s called that because they pump up water from the hot springs below and you can have a taste. In Victorian times, they thought this water had medicinal properties, but now it just tastes like bad mineral water. The tea was rather formal, and our kids tried some new foods, some good, some bad.
On day 8 we finally made it to London (on July 4th!) and the first big memory was our visit to the National Gallery, an art museum. It’s an amazing museum that has one of my favorite works, The Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio. But this wasn’t the most memorable part. You may have seen news of protests targeting works of art across Europe, where the protestors glue themselves to art frames or otherwise vandalize it. Turns out that while we were in the National Gallery, some of these protestors posted a dark, dystopian version of The Hay Wain by John Constable over the original. Because of this, they closed off the part of the gallery we were heading to. Remarkably, on our flight home we were playing a trivia game on the plane and The Hay Wain was the answer to one of the questions!
Day 9 may have been the best day of the trip, which started with a Beefeater-guided tour[2] of the Tower of London, and ended with seeing Les Misérables at the Sondheim Theater. Seeing a show on the West End was a bucket list item for my wife, and my son worked in theater production in high school, so it was a big deal for both of them, but we all really enjoyed the show. If I ever see a better show, I’ll be shocked. It was amazing and will be hard to top.
Those are the highlights for me, and of course we did many other things like visiting many “castles and churches,” as my kids say. We did some touristy things like going to Harrod’s, seeing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace[3], riding the London Eye, and visiting the British Museum. It was a packed vacation and my most memorable ever.
Have you been to the UK (or live there)? What are some of your best memories?
[1] Later in the trip, we saw his burial place in Westminster Abbey. [2] Our guide, Emma Rousell, was great and was just the third woman ever to be appointed as a Yeoman Warder (“Beefeater”) at the Tower. [3] Among other things, the bands played songs by Bon Jovi and Queen. The crowd sang along.
Driving Toward the Morning Sun 