My son, Jacob, is graduating from high school today and we are very proud of him! Jacob is on the autism spectrum and this is a milestone accomplishment in his life. The road to this day has been full of hills and twists and turns, but while Jacob has certainly learned a lot in the course of his education, his life and the journey he has travelled has also taught me several lessons along the way about God and his love. I wanted to share three of these as we celebrate his big day.
Category: <span>Devotional Thoughts</span>
This Sunday I have the pleasure of introducing our congregation (or most of them, anyway) to a new song as I lead worship. The song is “Hymn of Heaven” by Phil Wickham and you can find the video for the song below. The song is about the joy we will experience in heaven as we sing together in worship around the throne of God. One line of the song has always stood out to me: “And every prayer we prayed in desperation, the songs of faith we sang through doubt and fear, in the end, we’ll see that it was worth it, when He returns to wipe away our tears.”
We stand on the brink of one of the strangest Holy Weeks of my life. Unable to go to church because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am pretty sure this will be the first Easter Sunday that I don’t visit a sanctuary and worship.
In a previous post, I wrote about my first experience with a Buddhist “temple” in the central part of Thailand. On our last full day in the country, our team visited a more classical form of a Buddhist temple when we traveled to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep outside of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. The story behind this temple features the legend of a white elephant carrying Buddha’s shoulder bone to the top of a mountain, trumpeting three times, and then dropping dead. Based on this omen, the story goes, a temple was immediately ordered built on the site.
After breakfast, a devotion (our team is going through the book of Ephesians during our trip), and a primer on some Thai language and cultural do’s and don’t’s, we set off for the Mahanakhon, Bangkok’s tallest building. At the top of the building, there is an observation deck where you can look out over the whole city. There is even a glass platform you can step out onto and literally look down at some of the buildings.