Lonely Cottage

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  “Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be reckoned the high, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as they are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain counties in the south and south-west. If any mark of human occupation is met with hereon, it usually takes the form of the solitary cottage of some shepherd. Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may possibly be standing there now. In spite of its loneliness, however, the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five miles from a county-town. Yet that affected it little. Five miles of irregular upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who “conceive and meditate of ple...

"Supernatural Lessons from a Natural Disaster"

(from a message aired in August, 2005 on Grace to You)

We live in a society unlike any in the past, a world of electronic media, a world of mass communication, a world of overexposure to relentless visual images and enhancements. We see everything and we see it constantly. In fact, we’re not isolated from anything that happens anywhere in the world. Every catastrophe, every calamity, every cataclysm, every disaster, every tragedy everywhere eventually comes to us through the media and we vicariously experience all the pain and sorrow and suffering and death, whether it’s earthquakes in Mexico, or Japan, or Indonesia, or whether it’s famine in Africa or volcanic eruptions on various islands of the sea, or whether it’s horrific hurricanes in Asia or in Florida, whether it’s plagues in India, avalanches in Europe, wars in Iraq, whether it’s genocide, whether it’s suicidal terrorists in Israel or New York City or Washington D.C. or in a Russian school, whether it’s a plane crash, a train disaster, the sinking of ferry boat in a choppy sea in the English Channel, whatever it is, we are not isolated from these disasters, natural disasters, massacres, terrible crimes, calamitous events, despotic rulers who slaughter their people, images of war, gruesome killings with body parts lying all around, the killing of unborn children by abortion, gang murders of innocent children walking along the street or playing in their yard is a way the gang member gains credibility in his organization, whatever it is, we get it all. We cannot escape the information about catastrophic car wrecks that kill people. We see them replay it again and again on the nightly news, or house fires that burn up entire families.

Read the rest of the sermon here.

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