Presby-Musings

This morning as I was reading through my devotional books, I read from Psalm 93, which contains these words:  The seas have lifted up, Lord,  the seas have lifted up their voice;  the seas have lifted up their pounding waves. As I read those words, I glanced down at the newspaper on my desk which had a photo of a woman being carried to safety through the floodwaters that had overwhelmed her home in Houston.  Hurricane Harvey did a number on my new home state this week.   Thousands of people who live on Texas' coast are homeless today, millions are without power. In some areas of Houston there will be over four feet of rain by the time the storm finally moves northward.   This week we have seen the waters of the sea lift up their pounding waves, the rivers overflow and the rain fall in historic amounts.  I am sure it feels like it will never stop for those who have been in the midst of it for these past several days.   Some of you may n...

There are some texts in the Bible that disturb me. For example, there is this one story in the book of Judges where this guy is being accosted by these men who want to do vile things to him and he gives them his concubine (sort of a slave with "benefits") and they rape her all night long. She dies as a result, and the guy cuts her into twelve pieces and then sends the twelve pieces of his dead concubine to all of the tribes in protest. Yeah. Find some meaningful life lessons in that. I don't always know the meaning of some of the texts that I read in the Bible, and I've been at this Christian thing for a while. It must really be a bummer for people who are just entering the story and trying to figure it all out when they latch on to a Biblical passage like the one I just mentioned. Or even a more "main stream" kind of story like Noah, the Ark and the Great Flood, which has its own issues that we usually gloss over because it's just so darned famil...