Mental Musings

In the book God’s Smuggler, Holland missionary Andrew van der Bijl describes how he smuggled thousands of bibles into communist Russia. Known as Brother Andrew, he took many trips hiding bibles in various places in his Volkswagen Bug. He would pray that the soldiers did not find them while crossing the border because he would be put in prison if they did. The demand for the bibles was so great that on each trip he would pack more and more. Eventually he was filling his car with so many bibles that they were obviously visible to anyone. Even a near-sighted, half-blind man could easily see the bible stacked in his car. Brother Andrew would pray before reaching the border, “God, you gave sight to the blind, now I ask for you to make those with sight blind so that I can bring these bibles to those who need them. Most people hear about Brother Andrews exploits and are convinced that God worked miraculously. Some skeptics think that these soldiers were just lazy and didn’t reall

We have all done it. Yes, we have, at some point in our lives. Whether it was eating too much, drinking too much, staying out in the sun too much, spending too much, whatever. We have all gotten carried away doing way too much of something at some time. Most of the time all we needed to do was stop and we would be fine. But there is one time that getting carried away just seems to spiral out of our control: when we lie. You see, lying becomes this tangled mess that always seems to find a way to catch us at some point or another. Shakespeare wrote, “The truth will out.” The Bible put it this way, “For nothing is concealed that won’t be revealed, and nothing hidden that won’t be made known and come to light.” (Luke 8:17, HCSB) The thing about lying is that we usually get so carried away not wanting people to discover the truth, that we just continue with this ever-growing story that becomes impossible to maintain. We just cannot keep up with every detail of the lie. Eventuall

What would happen if the government suddenly told us that we could no longer visit YouTube on the Internet because it had videos that made the U.S. look bad? We would probably call it an attack on our freedoms and most people would still use YouTube regardless. What if they said we were no longer aloud to talk in public about a certain celebrity because that celebrity was talking negative about the U.S.? We would probably respond that we have freedom of speech and people would talk even more about that celebrity and what he or she had to say. We like to think that nothing like this could ever happen in the U.S., but it hasn’t been that long since freedoms were infringed upon certain people in our country. Freedoms have been taken away from others because of their supposed communist views during the McCarthyism era of the mid-20th Century, because of the color of their skin during the 19th and 20th Centuries, because of their race during the Native American relocations of the 1

During my middle school years they had a strict rule against PDA—public displays of affection. We were told that if caught doing anything that violated the PDA rule we would get afterschool detention. PDA included hugging, hand-holding, kissing, or anything that a teacher considered showing too much affection toward another student. The only time students held hands was as part of a P.E. game or when two or more girls were walking somewhere together. School dances were the one exception to this rule. After all, slow dancing was basically a form of hugging while moving to music. Dances were typically the only time I saw one of my friends holding hands with a girl at school. Kissing was still not allowed, but people usually found some out-of-the-way place to make out if they really wanted to. By high school the PDA rule had either changed or just was non-existent. Everywhere we went on campus we saw boys and girls holding hands, girls sitting on a guy’s lap, hugging each othe