Arens College Planning

07/20/2022

06/16/2022

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06/15/2022

https://www.facebook.com/645281268/posts/10158532624251269/

01/10/2022

As a new year begins, we should try to benefit from a view of what has gone before. I plead with you to remember that the past is to be learned from, but not lived in. We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences, but not the ashes.

And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced, then we should look ahead and remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. Faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives.

Some of you may wonder—particularly as we live through the daily tumult in the world around us today—“Is there any future for me?” What does a new year hold for me? Will I be safe? Will life be sound? Can I trust in the Lord and in the future?

Please remember this: faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ truly is the “high priest of good things to come” (Hebrews 9:11).

Keep your eyes on your dreams, however distant and far away. Live to see the miracles of repentance and forgiveness, of trust and divine love that will transform your life today, tomorrow, and forever. That is a New Year’s resolution I ask you to keep.

12/25/2021

In December of 1976, my father underwent surgery, but near the conclusion of it, he suffered a major heart attack that he would not recover from.

I spent several nights in the hospital with him. You will forgive me if I admit that somewhere in the early hours Christmas morning I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Of all the times to lose your dad, did it have to be the time when dads are the greatest guys in the world and gifts for little boys somehow appear that, in later years, would be recognized to be well beyond the meager Holland budget? Lying under that oxygen tent was the most generous man I have ever known, a Kris Kringle to end all Kris Kringles, and by some seemingly cruel turn of cardiac fate, it was Christmas morning and he was beginning the drawn-out process of dying.

Then and there heaven sent me a small, personal, pre-packaged revelation—a tiny declaration that was as powerful as any I have ever received. In the midst of mumbling, I heard the clear, unbroken cry of a baby. It truly startled me. I had long since ceased paying attention to where I was wandering that night, and only then did I realize I was near the maternity ward; somewhere, I suppose, near the nursery. To this day I do not know just where that baby was or how I heard it. I like to think it was a brand-new baby taking that first breath and announcing that he or she had arrived in the world, the fact of which everyone was supposed to take note.

“Jeff, my boy,” my Father in Heaven seemed to say with that baby’s cry, “I expected a little more from you. If you can't remember why all of this matters, then your approach to Christmas is no more virtuous than the over-commercialization everyone laments these days.

“You need to shape up just a little, to put your theology where your Christmas carols are. You can’t separate Bethlehem from Gethsemane, or the hasty flight into Egypt from the slow journey to the summit of Calvary. It’s of one piece. It is a single plan.

“Christmas is joyful not because it is a season or decade or lifetime without pain and privation, but precisely because life does hold those moments for us, but also holds an answer to them.”

Artwork: "Little Lamb" used with permission from the artist Jenedy Paige.