Roses of Grace

"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings," said Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his most famous quotes.   I'm sure many of us resonate with this. I know I do—I have about as many interests as a porcupine has quills, and I badly want to pursue all of them. If only I didn't have basic human needs like sleep, food, and rest, I'd never be bored a day in my life. Many of these desires are quite wonderful. I want to help out in church ministries, start Bible studies, and improve my skills for the glory of God. Surely these are good things. Right? Yes. But when I tried to pursue them, I find out that even a wonderful thing can be damaging if you aren't careful. If you load yourself up with responsibilities, you may be able to handle it.  At first.  And then you start not being able to handle it, and feeling tired. This is just an off week for me, you think. Tomorrow I'll catch up.   But you don't. You'...

This post shall be in a different vein than my usual content due to my lack of mental energy at the moment. (Learning Spanish is hard, and socializing is hard. Therefore, learning Spanish by socializing is a great recipe for well-deserved exhaustion.) It's a story about an ice cream shop here in Asunción. And it's a story about ambiguous marketing designs and the funny situations that can arise from them.  Here is the shop:  (There's also me eating an ice cream cone. It was delicious, in case you were wondering.) You see the name? What do you think it says?  Parvs, right. I agree. Good eye. And cool design. A while ago, our hosts saw that ice cream store and decided that they wanted to check it out at some point. Since they didn't have time that day, they drove on past, intending to return later.  Eventually it was time to get some ice cream. So they pulled up Google Maps and started looking for Parvs.  For some reason, they couldn't find it.  Parvs just wa...

"All you need is love."  So say the Beatles, and as everyone knows, they're a great authority on life philosophy!  The trouble with the quote above isn't that it's wrong. It's that it isn't specific enough. Looked at one way, all you really need is love—but what kind of love? Whose love?  One of my favorite movies is the cult classic The Princess Bride . True love is a big deal in that film—it's the driving force behind the main characters' actions, and spurs a whole handful of cheesy and memorable quotes. "Love," says the Venerable Clergyman in his distinctive voice, "true love will follow you forever." But while the idea of true love has infiltrated our society's media, do we actually know what it is?  As Christians, this question is extremely important. The first and greatest commandment in the whole Bible is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind," and the ...

I've had several experiences in my life that make me pause and think: "The heavens really do declare the glory of God." The first was the total solar eclipse of 2017. (Kind of hard to beat the sun being replaced by a black hole.) But visiting the Iguazu Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil certainly comes close.  Getting to the falls was quite the process. Our whole group piled into the van and drove over the border from Paraguay to Brazil—they didn't check our passports for some reason, so it didn't take too long—and arrived at the Iguazu Falls National Park.  All we had to do then was take a taxi or bus up to the falls themselves. And, despite several transport mishaps (including a taxi driving one group back to Paraguay instead of to the falls by mistake), we made it to Iguazu.  Iguazu Falls is the largest waterfall system in the world. Though it isn't the highest, there are 275 waterfalls on the cliffs—and if you see it in person, the sight goes bey...

Whose opinion do you care about? There are only two answers to this question: the world, or God.  People always act differently depending on who they're around. When you're talking to your friends, I'll bet you use different words and mannerisms than you would if you were interviewing for a prospective internship or job—or if you were with your parents at a family reunion.  School, work, home, church. These are all different spheres of your life.  Why do you act differently in each of them if you're still the same person inside?  It's because you care about the opinions of others. You want them to like you—everyone does, it's natural—so you're going to behave in a way that you think presents yourself well. A way that they like.  We like people liking us. That makes sense—you want to be loved, not hated.  But acting like this can lead us to sin.  If you only behave when you're around your teachers, since your classmates at school think it's funny to m...

(Note: Please excuse the quality of the photographs in this post. I have an iPhone 7 for a camera, and very little skill in using it.) (That aside, let us get to the post.)   One interesting thing about Paraguay is the incredible diversity of the sidewalks here.  The system is different, you see. Instead of the government owning part of your front yard so that they can put in nice off-white squares of cement, every homeowner is responsible for their own sidewalk. It comes with the house. So, you'll get wonderful beautiful sidewalks like this one with the black swirly design: ... as well as less beautiful ones. Not everyone can afford to put in a nice sidewalk, and that shows. Asuncion is a diverse place—almost shockingly so, sometimes, when you see sleek modern duplexes next to houses that probably haven't seen better days.  That's the way the city works. Lower-class people buy some cheap land on the edges of the city and build a small house. Then the population grows, a...

Human beings have been created with words, and words have a whole lot of power.  Words have the power to build others up and to tear others down. And even though we know that they're important, it's sometimes hard to understand how important they really are.  The best kind of words are words of encouragement. Building one another up is something that we as Christians are commanded to do—1 Thessalonians 5:11 says, "Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing."  Why is it so important to encourage each other with our words?  In short, because it benefits us—it benefits everyone, both the giver and the recipient.    Blessing the hearer The most prized gifts that I've ever been given are the notes that my friends and family have given me.  Some of these were for my birthday, some were given because I was going through a hard time, and some were just random. No matter the history, though, they make me smile every time I r...

This week we had the privilege of going to a school in Asuncion to give a presentation about responding to bullying with Biblical principles. The school was lovely (second graders are very cute, y'all), and it was a wonderful time. There was a sign on the wall that made me pause, though. It read, "Con Dios siempre es primavera." Translated, that means, "with God it's always spring."  While I was happy to see a sign like that at a government-run school, I wasn't really sure whether or not I agreed. Literally, of course, spring is only around 25% of the time—but the metaphor isn't so accurate either.  The walk of a Christian isn't one of perpetual sunshine and birdsong. Sometimes the winds come, and the storm clouds gather. But that doesn't mean that God isn't good.   A time for spring Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 says, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to pl...