A Bondservant's Musings

As a humid, 95-degree July day comes to a close, I am reminded of something I saw after the biggest snowstorm of last winter in Chicago. New-fallen snow is beautiful and bright white. When it's untouched, it looks so white, so pure. Then we start walking on it, driving on it, pushing it around with shovels, snow blowers and plows. Whatever that mixture is they put on the roads to melt the ice gets mixed in. That once pure snow becomes dingy, dirty, hard, crusty and anything but clean. When Snowpocalypse 2011 hit, all of the Chicago area was covered in a foot or two of new-fallen snow. Many weeks after Snowpocalypse 2011, I still saw a giant pile of snow in one spot on my train ride home every day. But what used to be pure white, fresh and almost breath-taking was now black, gray, crystalized, hard and ugly. What happened? Human intervention. Time. And no more new-fallen snow. The same thing happens in our lives. A fresh touch from God after a time of confession in our...

On a recent vacation to the Big Island of Hawai'i, I noticed an abundance of "Slippery When Wet" signs to apparently help stop vacationers from slipping or falling. As I saw more of these in the first few days of our vacation on the island, it got me thinking two things: Do we need all these signs? After all, aren't most things slippery when wet? And do items that don't get slippery when wet -- and I am having trouble thinking of any such items right now -- pose a problem for us? Couldn't we just assume surfaces are slippery when wet? Since there are so many of these warning signs, does anyone pay attention to them? That last question plus the presence of cairns ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairn ) my wife and I followed to stay on the Kilauea Iki Crater Trail in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on a hike later in our trip got me thinking about the spiritual equivalents of those "Slippery When Wet" signs that I think most of us are ignoring and ...