Wakefield

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  “In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very uncommon, nor, without a proper distinction of circumstances, to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency, and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in London. The man, under pretense of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upward of twenty years. During that period he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield. And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity—when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled...

"Supernatural Lessons from a Natural Disaster"

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(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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