CLICK ON THIS PDF LINK TO ACCESS THE CENTRAL CALL  AUGUST 2023

CLICK ON THIS PDF LINK TO ACCESS AUGUST BIRTHDAYS

SCROLL DOWN FOR ALL NEWS CENTRAL

One thing we know about life is that it refuses to stand still. But what is amazing – sometimes confounding – is that sometimes success ends up as failure and failure may be the royal road to success. As long as there is life, there is great hope, for no one needs to stay the way he or she is. A miracle can come in a minute or through a whole lifetime.

When Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, his novel The Old Man and the Sea was cited during the presentation. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman who had gone for eighty-four days without so much as a catch. On the eighty-fifth day, he went out farther into the sea and a giant marlin took his deepest bait. The struggle between fish and fisherman ensued. The fisherman pulled day and night with his small skiff, until on the third day, the exhausted marlin surfaced. With hands torn and bleeding and his body aching with pain, the old man had won the battle. Or had he?

The fisherman lashed the eighteen-foot giant to the boat, raised his sail, and began the long trip back. Then came the sharks – first one, then a pair, and then more. The old man fought them until he had nothing more to fight with. They tore the meat from the fish until, when shortly before daylight the fisherman landed in his harbor, all that was left of the magnificent catch was the skeleton. His victory ended in defeat.

When we look around, we see how often this happens - after a terrible struggle only the skeleton of some fine victory remains.

But it can be just the opposite. Jesus gave everything of himself, but the crowds left him. We hear him almost plaintively asking his disciples, “Will you also go away?” Then, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he pleaded that the cup might pass, but it didn’t. Then he was arrested, tried, beaten, spit on, and crucified. No one looking on could have given any opinion of his effort except failure. But on the third day, there was sunrise and proclamation: “He lives!” Failure from our human perspective had become magnificent success for humankind. We cannot fully explain how that victory was achieved, but you can be sure it was all wrapped up in Jesus’ final statement, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

Two different stories, one about an old fisherman, the other of a young carpenter – stories about the success and failure of our little enterprise and about how one never knows the verdict until God’s final touch.

In Christ, Rick