Spring of Hope

"Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. " (John 14:10). Martin Luther called this passage "the best and most comforting sermon that the Lord Christ delivered on earth, a treasure and a jewel not to be purchased with the world's goods." Jesus continued, "I go to prepare a place for you.. I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also...I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me." Picturing life as a journey is a very old concept. We move from one day to the next, one year to the next, one period of our life to another, just as on a journey one travels from place to place. We travel the journey of life that will lead to the destination. Our jouney takes us through a series of stages: baby stages, growing up, leaving home and so on until the journey in this world ends with death. A lot of us set goals at various stages and places we wan...

Google introduced ' Ngram Viewer ' which is a seductively simple tool online that generates a chart tracking the popularity of a word or phrase in books and writings during a selected period in history. Ngram is a computational linguistics and probability study to look for contiguous sequence of 'n' items from a given sequence of text or speech useful to build linguistic models. It will search for a particular word like 'faith' or a phrase like 'faith in God'. A search of Ngram database shows the word 'faith' winning over 'doubt' in American English during the 1800s. But 'doubt' ran past 'faith' in the early 1900s and later the two terms tracked rather closely. During the 1980s, however, 'faith' won over 'doubt' ! But 'Faith in God' shows a poor graph in the 2000s!! There are still studies to be completed before we can know the reason for variations. No one can live a single day without ex...

The second Sunday in May is celebrated as mother's day to honor all mothers around the world. Michelle Duggar, 43 years old is the mother of 19 children as of 2015; nine sisters and 10 brothers. There is a TV show called “19 kids and counting” based on their family . The Duggars' oldest child Josh, is 23 and the youngest Jennifer is 3 years. There are two sets of twins. The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas. All the childrens' names start with the letter J. Mom Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 12 years of her life, and that’s with two sets of twins; otherwise it would have been close to 14 years of pregnancy. Job’s wife spent about 15 or more of years carrying children.There are only 3 verses in reference to Job's wife; they are Job 2:9 (curse God and die), Job 19:17 (My breath is offensive to my wife} and Job 31:10 (may my wife grind another man's grain). She is not looked upon as a good person. I've heard many pr...

In the 1970s, a group of people in the audience in the front row of a cinema theater fled from their seats before the oncoming train on the screen. A great grandmother waved her handkerchief as the queen’s carriage passed by on the screen. There are those who refuse to believe that man landed on the moon because the pictures look like they were made in a lab with shady black and white images. We learn from experience that not all we see is real and all that glitters is not gold. Supermarket discounts appear to offer products at half-price turn out to be not real when you go there to shop. In the age of electronic mass media when video clips on social media go 'viral’, people doubt about what is real and what isn’t. Seeing and believing may seem easy. Jesus said, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." (John 20:29) and “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” There is a significant difference between believing without seeing and bel...