“Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence. (1 John 3:18-19)

Jesus tells us in several places in the gospels that we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. This teaching is reinforced by Paul and other writers throughout the New Testament. In John 15 He also tells us that we are to love each other as He has loved us, and that when we do what he commands we are his friend.

Who is your neighbor? It is your fellow worshipers that gather with you every Sunday, even the ones that you rarely talk to or even know their name. It is your fellow Christians that gather in other churches on Sunday that you may never meet. It is your doctor, your teacher, your students, the clerk in the grocery store, your Uber driver, the barista at Starbucks. In short, everyone you meet or see today is your neighbor.

How do you love yourself? What actions do you take to show that you care for yourself? Are you willing to love your neighbor in the same way? You have at your disposal time, talent and treasure. Will you use those things to show true friendship to a new neighbor who walks through the doors of your church? Will you make a conscious effort to invite a neighbor to church and thus create the opportunity for new friendships?

Lord, show me a neighbor I can love as you loved me. Help me to be a positive influence with my neighbor, and most of all, may I have the courage to invite that neighbor to come to God’s house where He will be welcomed as a friend. Amen.

Let’s start with the basics.  Either there is a God or there isn’t. “In the beginning God created…” (Gen 1:1)  That is a big statement. “God created the heavens and earth – all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.” That’s Gen 1:1 in The Message translation. Now I know that it is modern to believe that there is no God responsible for creation. Most scientists would have us believe that sometime in the ancient past there was an accidental ‘big bang’ that ultimately resulted in an elemental life form. Then, somehow a series of random environmental circumstances caused that piece of ‘life’ in the primordial ooze to start evolving into more complex life forms until, wow, a human!  So, in that belief system I am not a creation of an almighty powerful God but simply fortunate that all of my amphibious, reptilian, avian, simian ancestors were in the right place at the right time to somehow morph into a higher life form, eventually leading to a human being standing up on two legs and thinking for himself.  I’m sorry but that version just requires too much faith. Rather, I choose to exercise a lesser amount of faith and just take the Bible at its word. God decided He wanted an earth so he made one. He thought about how he wanted to populate it and ended up making elephants, lions, dogs, monkeys and even bacteria and insects.  When that wasn’t enough He decided that there needed to be someone to look out for all these creatures so He made Adam and Eve and caused them to have the ability to reproduce themselves.   He literally took a handful of dirt from the ground and formed it with His hands and breathed life into the first man, Adam.  Then, after deciding that Adam couldn’t make it on his own (sorry men), He took a rib from Adam and formed a woman named Eve.  Now there were living souls on Earth, in the garden. Hence, in 1946 here comes me, an ancestor of many generations of the created Adam & Eve. Consider carefully, which version of how you got here is easier to believe?

So who created God? Where did He come from?  This is a question that is often posed by non-believers.  I have a well thought out answer that should be adequate for our purposes – I don’t know!  Uh-oh, does that mean that the whole belief in creation falls apart?  Not at all, somewhere along the line we have to exercise faith in something.  In the big-bang/evolutionary model, can they tell us where those first particles came from that miraculously banged up against each other and created the universe? Can they tell us how somehow an inert piece of ‘stuff’ suddenly took on life? No!  If God has to have a provable beginning, then why don’t those swirling masses of gas and particles have to have a provable beginning?  I just find it a lot easier to believe as the Bible says in Revelations 1:8, “I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come…” (New Living Translation)  I don’t have to understand where God came from, it is enough for me to see how everything around me points to the fact that it must be true, God just is and He made all of this!

I have been writing short devotionals for my church bulletin for awhile now. I am going to be posting video versions of them here. I welcome your comments – good idea? bad idea? No one should have to see this, just stick to writing?

I recently started working on a post called Who Am I Really? Imagine my surprise when I realized that I had published it instead of saving it for completion later. Bottom line, it wasn’t finished!! I have a lot more to say on the subject, so I guess the published one was Part One, and, stay tune for Part Two.

Today I had occasion to use a public restroom. As I finished washing my hands and turned to leave I was faced by a large mirror. It wasn’t a full-length mirror but it was large enough to see myself from the waist up. I was immediately struck by the image that I saw staring back at me. It was not because it was a particularly attractive image, not at all. It was because the question immediately came to mind, who is that guy? I have been around this earth for 72 years, so I certainly understood the concept of a mirror, and I knew that I was looking at a reflection of myself. 

Stay with me now, this may be a way of thinking that you are not familiar with. I know that I never thought of my image in this way. I am known as being somewhat introspective, and this was one of those prime examples. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I wondered, is what I see the real me? Or is what I think the real me? Is that flesh and blood bald-headed body covered with clothing and wearing glasses Chuck? Or is everything I am thinking and feeling the real Chuck? 

If someone were to ask you if you knew me, your brain would quickly peruse your memory banks and come up with an image. Oh yeah, you would say, I know him. But do you really know me, or just know the package that contains me. You may have spent a lot of time talking to me so you think you know the real me. You have to realize, however, that the things I say to you may not reflect how the real me thinks. I may have said to you what I knew you wanted to hear, or I may have given you an opinion about something that was not really what I believed, but I just didn’t want to hurt your feelings.  See the possibilities here?

A wise woman said, “It doesn’t matter what you say, what you do, or what you believe, what matters is how you do it, how you say it, how you go about it.” (Pastor Tara Thomas Smith)