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On the Banks of the Sugar River
The Parson-Storyteller is Circuit-Riding This week. A couple times a day I’m preaching on the banks of the Sugar River that runs into the Tittabawassee, that joins the Shiawassee and spills into Saginaw Bay. The days have been clear, the nights cool. It’s Michigan at it’s best this week.
I’m speaking at The Springs, a Christian camp in the palm of the Michigan Mitten this week. Yesterday I decided to go to town for a change of pace. On the way out I saw an elderly man named John standing by his truck. We fell into easy conversation. He was a retired school teacher. The bed of his truck was filled with food. He bought the food with his own money. Milk. Hams. Potatoes. Onions. He hunts for bargains and he donates the food to the camp.
He said; “When I was a boy I couldn’t afford to go to camp. I like to help keep the cost of camp low so any kid who wants to go can.”
So because of men like John kids who don’t have a lot of money can ride the zip-line. They can experience the smell of pine on the summer air. They can listen to the call of birds on the river on a summer afternoon. They can swim and canoe with their friends. They can laugh with their friends and flirt a little bit. They can over-eat junk food at the Snack Shack. They can make new friends from all over the state. They can follow a pine-needle carpeted path and read their Bible out under a tree. They can stare into a fragrant open fire. When the evening gets quiet and the sun begins to set they will make their way to chapel and sing their hearts out. When the singing is done they will hear the same story that changed John’s heart one day years ago. When chapel is done they will walk quietly under the stars back to their cabins. After a little horse-play and banter they can burrow down into a sleeping bag for the night and drift off to sleep to the sound of crickets and frogs out in the cool Michigan night.
John is 80 and he remembers that sixty-five years ago his girlfriend got to go to camp but he couldn’t afford to.
The Sunshine of Eternity (Sermon)
Do you ever feel like what you do for the Lord won’t last and doesn’t matter? You will want to listen to this message.
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King of the Nations
On the Independence Day weekend my heart was heavy about the direction our country is taking. The Lord burdened my heart as I flew across our whole nation from California where I spoke on Thursday and Friday all the way back to Detroit. I studied the book of Judges and wrote this message. If your heart is heavy over the direction our nation is taking this message will encourage you and give you come direction.
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The Call of the Eternal
[photo taken by Chuk Pierpont at Duck Point on Wolf Lake near Watersmeet, Michigan]
Does the “call of the eternal” ring clearly in your soul?
J. H. Jowett’s book The Preacher, His Life and Work is the text of his 1912 Yale Lectures on Preaching. They are over 100 years old but I have read the re-read them dozens of times. The lectures often have a lyrical quality, a poetic beauty about them. In the first lecture he describes the sense of calling a pastor must have–but I think this same sense of eternity should ring in the heart of every follower of Christ.
“The call of the Eternal must ring through the rooms of his soul as clearly as the sound of the morning bell rings through the valleys of Switzerland, calling the peasant to early prayer and praise.”
Since I was a young teen I have had at least a faint sense of the eternal embedded in my soul. I pray that God will help me live out all my days before me with a continual and sweet sense of holy duty tugging at me from the deepest place in my soul. Though I live in a noisy world, may the call of the Eternal ring though my soul as clearly and beautifully as the sound of the bell in an alpine valley calling men and women to prayer.
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