Kenton J. Kutney

wise men still seek Him believing to understand love blossoms to life no mere fairytale   for this genealogy   runs back through all time   this story starts where  many stories get there start  love, but immortal a few hundred years  awaiting God's next big move  He visits a teen boy meets girl, in love yet there's a classic plot twist this love's a faith leap something has happened  O Mary what have you done  ponder in your heart fear ... 'fear not! fear not!' there must've been some real fright  so many questions  have you heard the news  the stars' configuration  let the quest begin angel wings choir sings shepherds and their flocks by night lit by guiding star poor but rich in heart shepherds especially blessed great is their reward  stars, sheep, cows, angels creation calls Creator  baby King in manger from far away lands we have come to worship Him  words fail to express the small toddler coos...

God’s presence is not the same as the feeling of God’s presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least. - CS Lewis

Just right for the season.  Merry Christmas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1E-9Z8sFyRs

And now we begin to see what it is that the New Testament is always talking about. It talks about Christians ‘being born again’; it talks about them ‘putting on Christ’; about Christ ‘being formed in us’; about our coming to ‘have the mind of Christ’. Put right out of your head the idea that these are only fancy ways of saying that Christians are to read what Christ said and try to carry it out .... They mean that a real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new...

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him ... and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. C.S. Lewis From The Problem of Pain

I was pondering some true friends in a story Luke tells in chapter 5 (after listening to an excellent lecture I downloaded by Barbara Mutch),  who were trying to get into a house meeting Jesus was speaking at. She described how the pharisees were already there with their critical thinking at work and so many others jammed shoulder to shoulder these friends could not get in.  People were spilling outside the doorway trying to hear. These friends had brought a fellow along who was so sick he was on a stretcher. Stumped, one of the friends spied a set of stairs leading up to the roof where the family cooled off in the evening breeze coming off the lake.  ...Here’s where I saw myself in the story and started to laugh until I cried: They decided to try to haul the mat up the steps, leveraging it carefully so as to not dump their cargo off the stairs.  Once atop the roof they then got the goofy idea to pry off the ceiling tiles and made a hole. ...