It's a weird thing to think about, but often, when we travel across the International Date Line, we have no alibi for a certain day on the calendar. Other times we live a day that never seems to end! It's a weird thing.
Wikipedia explains it thus:
The first date line problem occurred in association with the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan's expedition (1519–1522). The surviving crew (a mere 18 men on 217 who departed) returned to a Spanish stopover sure of the day of the week, as attested by various carefully maintained sailing logs. Nevertheless, those on land insisted the day was different. This phenomenon, now readily understandable, caused great excitement at the time, to the extent that a special delegation was sent to the Pope to explain this temporal oddity to him.
The effect of ignoring the date line is also seen in Jules Verne's book Around the World in Eighty Days, in which the travelers, led by Phileas Fogg, return to London after a trip around the world, thinking that they have lost the bet that is the central premise of the story. Having traveled the direction opposite to the one taken by Magellan, they believe the date there to be one day later than it truly is. Lest anyone accuse Fogg of cheating by obtaining one extra day, this is not so. On average, each travel day was 18 minutes short of a full 24 hours, accumulating to one full day, which they failed to correct as we would by setting our calendar back a day in mid-Pacific.
The date line is also a central factor in Umberto Eco's book The Island of the Day Before, in which the protagonist finds himself on a becalmed ship, with an island close at hand on the other side of the International Date Line. Unable to swim, the protagonist's writings indulge in increasingly confused speculation of the physical, metaphysical and religious import of the date line.The International Date Line can cause confusion among airline travelers. The most troublesome situation usually occurs with short journeys from west to east. To travel from Tonga to Samoa by air, for example, takes approximately two hours but involves crossing the International Date Line, causing passengers to arrive the day before they left. This often causes confusion in travel schedules, like hotel bookings (unless those schedules quote times in UTC, but they typically do not since they must match domestic travel times, local transport, or meeting times).
FYI: The International Date Line (IDL) is an imaginary line on the surface of the Earth opposite the Prime Meridian where the date changes as one travels east or west across it. Roughly along 180° longitude, with diversions to pass around some territories and island groups, it mostly corresponds to the time zoneboundary separating −12 and +12 hours Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) (Greenwich Mean Time – GMT). Crossing the IDL travelling east results in a day or approximately 24 hours being subtracted, and crossing west results in a day being added.
NEWSWEEK: So to you, faith is not a comfort?
MADELEINE L'ENGLE: Good heavens, no. It's 
a challenge: I dare you to believe in God
NEWSWEEK: Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.
MADELEINE L'ENGLE: Then they're not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and it's essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
by Jill Carattini
"Please—Mr. Lion—Aslan—Sir?" said Digory working up the courage to ask. "Could you—may I—please, will you give me some magic fruit of this country to make my mother well?"
A child in one of the Narnia books, Digory, at this point in the story, had brought about much disaster for Aslan and his freshly created Narnia. But he had to ask. In fact, he thought for a second he might attempt to make a deal with Aslan. But quickly Digory realized the Lion was not the sort of person one could try to make bargains with.
C.S. Lewis then recounts, "Up till then the child had been looking at the lion's great front feet and the huge claws on them. Now in his despair he looked up at his face. And what he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and wonder of wonders great shining tears stood in the lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the lion must really be sorrier about his mother than he was himself."
Dickens often spoke of his characters as beloved and "real existences." I have often wondered if the "safe but never tame" Lion ministered to C.S. Lewis half as much as this Christ figure has ministered to others. Lewis was a boy about the age of Digory when his mother lay dying of cancer and he was helpless to save her.
"My son, my son," said Aslan. "I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another…"
The tremendous figure that fills the Gospels towers above all attempts we have made to describe him. Yet had we been in charge of writing the story of God becoming man, I doubt it would have been Christ we described: "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not" (Isaiah 53:3). He was not the stoic, man of nerves we might have imagined. Nor was he the ever-at-peace teacher we often describe. He was, among other things, a man of sorrows.
There is, for me, immense comfort in a Christ who wasn't always smiling. As I picture his face set as flint toward Jerusalem, my fear is unfastened by his fortitude. As I imagine the urgency in his voice as he defended a guilty woman amidst a crowd holding rocks, my shame is freed by his mercy. And as I picture him weeping at the grave of Lazarus, and sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane, my tears are given depth by his own cries. I don't grieve alone.
"But you, O God," cries the psalmist, "do see trouble and grief." Becoming man, the character of God was not compromised or misrepresented in any way. God cannot be something other than Himself. As Jesus knew tears, the heart of God is one that knows grief: "Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted" (Isaiah 53:4). "Then [Pilate] released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified" (Matthew 27:26).
Perhaps mourning hearts are blessed because they are at this point closest to the deepest wound of the heart of God. "My son, my daughter, I know."
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
A BOOK REVIEW of Dick Keyes' Chameleon Christianity: Moving Beyond Safety and Conformity, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999), 121 pp
Dick Keyes believes one thing keenly: that Jesus’ call to serve as salt and light in a decaying, dark world is largely being ignored by Evangelical Christians in the Western world. While Jesus’ salt and light metaphors are radical and interactive and call for a critical engagement of culture, Keyes asserts that Evangelical Christians have handled the metaphors badly and fallen prey to one of two wrong approaches: (1) they have become saltless salt. A distinctive Christian identity is lost, and the believer has nothing to offer the world that the world does not already have. Or (2) they 
have become a light hidden under a bushel basket and fallen prey to Christian tribalism. In this error, Christian distinctiveness is contained within a Christian ghetto or subculture.
It is into this morass that Keyes wades with Chameleon Christianity. The grist for the book has surely been Keyes’ work over three decades with student-oriented L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, England, and Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard University and Westminster Theological Seminary, Keyes’ areas of particular interest include apologetics, the intersection between psychology and theology, and Christianity and culture. He has written several other books, True Heroism (1995) and Beyond Identity (1984, 1998), also primarily intended for the young adult reader intent on regaining a more biblically countercultural strategy of engagement. Apologists Francis Schaeffer, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton have evidently been Keyes’ mentors.
Compromise and tribalism are not new to the people of God; Keyes briefly illustrates their existence in the biblical literature before providing a more thorough analysis of the present-day church. He concludes by {197} arguing that (1) the recovery of apologetics, and (2) the recovery of the church as community, will restore the church to Jesus’ salt and light objectives. Regarding (1) apologetics, Keyes asserts that it is not possible to engage people with the gospel until one has first understood their arguments, and so he argues passionately for Christians to listen seriously and lovingly to peoples’ ideas, beliefs, objections, gripes, doubts, and struggles. The flip side of the issue is that Christians who do not understand the Scriptures will have nothing at all to say to unbelievers.
Regarding (2) the church as community, Keyes asserts that the Western church has become a lifestyle enclave. The New Testament church was by far more diverse than ours but corralled chaos through a common commitment to Christ’s lordship. Keyes argues that a recovery of the biblical concept of the church as community will pull the church back from the twin dangers of compromise and tribalism. “Our hope,” he concludes, “lies in being open to the challenge of the Bible in our individual and collective lives” (113).
If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Frederick Buechner Now & Then
God spoke to Balaam through his ass... I believe God still speaks through asses today...So if God should choose to speak through you - you needn't think too highly of yourself.
Rich Mullins Lufkin, Texas August 1997
The world's greatest band on the world's largest stage - U2 on YouTube. Watch the rebroadcast of the full live streaming performance from the Rose Bowl. Recorded on Sunday, October 25th.
Painting is so much more satisfying than ministry, well, in the short run it is. When I finish painting a room or a wall, I stand back and say, "Wow, look at the difference!"
You can see the result! Everything is fresh and clean and bright. There's a sense of accomplishment.
With ministry, or teaching or nearly any people oriented helping profession, there's often a lag time, a gap between the planting and the harvesting. With much of what I do there's a need for hope and patience and perseverance.
While I find great significance and meaning in what I do, sometimes I temporarily think of returning to painting for the immediacy of the satisfaction. But then, like mowing the grass or taking out the rubbish, some refurbishments need to be done repeatedly and are not permanent or eternal.
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