Grief

Grief.

Five letters that only briefly capture hint at the experience of loss. Loss of a friend, loss of a parent, but perhaps one of the most painful losses of all, the loss of a mate whom God Himself has prepared for you and whose loss is, to quote C.S. Lewis, "The crushing blow, the loss, which is Satan's corruption of that great gift of loving and being loved." And that is a bitter pill to swallow. 

And I believe that on top of everything else, the undeniable theological fact that God ordains all our steps, and nothing escapes his attention or providence. Which of course means that what God brought together, He, as the Creator and Sustainer of all that is in the universe, allowed to break. That grief can come about due to death, divorce, or perhaps the worst of all, the culmination of a thousand silent (and not so silent) cuts by all involved. 

Bobby Cox's Three Rules

Interview Notes: John Smoltz is a former major-league pitcher who is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He played for manager Bobby Cox for almost 20 years with the Atlanta Braves. Cox is fourth all-time with 2,497 wins and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014. Cox, 84, died on Saturday.

"There’s no player in the history of the game who was impacted more by Bobby Cox than me.

He was the general manager of the Atlanta Braves who traded for me in 1987, and then he became my manager for almost 20 years with the Braves.

In the 1991 season, I was 2-11 and headed nowhere. The cries for sending me down to the minors or moving me to the bullpen were getting louder and louder. Bobby just didn’t pay attention to it. He kept staying with me — he just knew that I would turn it around.

He gave players confidence when they had zero. He just had this quality about him that said to you: I believe in you. You’re going to get this done.

I did and the rest is history.

The Wages Of Sin Is Death

"Now a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim said to his mother, “The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and about which I heard you utter a curse—I have that silver with me; I took it.”

Then his mother said, “The Lord bless you, my son!”

When he returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, she said, “I solemnly consecrate my silver to the Lord for my son to make an image overlaid with silver. I will give it back to you.”

So after he returned the silver to his mother, she took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to a silversmith, who used them to make the idol. And it was put in Micah’s house.

Now this man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and some household gods and installed one of his sons as his priest. In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit." - Judges 17: 1-6

[Beginning with the deceit of a child stealing from his mother, we will see the impact of one man's sin on an entire nation . . . 

The Foundation Of Moral Law

"If there is no God, all is permitted" is a famous philosophical, often-quoted phrase linked to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. 

Sounds simple doesn't it? For if there is no divine law-giver, than each of us is free to discern our own moral conduct. And if there is one thing I know to be true, the human heart is unparalleled when it comes to the ability to rationalize our own behavior. 

The Russian novelist Dostoevsky in “The Brothers Karamazov” was deeply right when having another character comment on the skeptical Ivan Karamazov's intellectual position: "Crime must be considered not only as admissible but even as the logical and inevitable consequence of an atheist's position." Elsewhere, Dostoevsky has another character say: "Then, if there is no God, man becomes master of the earth and of the universe. That's great. But then, how can a man be virtuous without God? That's the snag, and I always come back to it. For whom will man love then? Whom will he be grateful to? . . . We, for instance, may think that virtue is one thing while the Chinese may believe it's something quite different. Isn't virtue something relative then?" The bloody history of the religiously skeptical yet politically fanatical 20th century shows this snag indeed caught atheists and agnostics: Wasn’t the Europe of the Nazis and Communists even morally darker than that of Medieval Catholicism at its collective worst?