"Transferral..............."

Our church school varsity boys’ basketball team lost the second round in the state tournament last week by two points. Last night junior varsity went down in their first game by the same amount. Previous success at the event for the last several years has brought home a number of trophies, so I know hearts are heavy this morning. My grandson plays this evening in the All-Star edition, but all these kids special to me. This old man is always concerned about their inner existence, that part of them being shaped every day by the world around them, life as it comes to them. Disappointments and achievements are part of it. The human soul is a precious commodity, a mystery in a myriad of forces acting upon it as we go. Each step brings to us multiple choices, paths to take, each leading to who knows where. Without an anchor-line providing us direction in our stumble forward, there is no meaning to it at all. Our mind can’t comprehend the magnitude. The numbers are beyond us. I read somewhere that there are nine galaxies for every person alive, each with at least one hundred billion suns. Consider, then, that Hitler’s Holocaust, approximately eleven million people were eliminated, one million of them young children. Stalin, about the same time of WWII, massacred more than ten million peasants. Pol Pot, during the sixties and seventies, wiped out a couple million within Cambodia; and, in China, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” beginning in the late fifties would reduce that nation’s population by an estimated forty-five million. Numbers. Is really no more than a matter of numbers? I sat in a Science class Friday morning and watched a video with my students, one where a Christian scientist discussed DNA and RNA in terms of it having God’s thumb print there in the details. Each and every one of us know a different combination of what makes us who we are, but the schematics, in general, hold about three and a half billion specifics inserted into that microscopic piece of our identity. Does that make us “special” among everything else in God’s creation? A frog is put together in accordance with thirty-eight billion directional instructions; and a common fern requires much more than that! That which separates us from all else is not that which perishes, but that which is eternal; and, while it does not “elevate” us in any manner, it does “distinguish” us. We are made in His image, stamped with His signature; but, beyond that, we were created to know Him within our existence. In America, more and more, the next generation faces a struggle to retain that truth. They need more than our denominational statement of faith. Somehow Christ “in” me must be a reality that overflows into their vessel, not merely a message I preach, a demand for them to conform unto my thinking……