Of Wal-Mart And Pilgrims

I spent quite a few hours with 2Peter 3 today. What awesome reminders: Christ is going to return, the earth is going to be destroyed, and a new righteous earth will be created. I can hardly wait.

I'm hoping that there will be no Wal-Mart on the new earth. This is fresh in my mind, since I spent an hour today on the property of Cheyenne's brand new "Super" Wal-Mart. The entire hour didn't consist of shopping, of course. A good percentage of it was actually taken up with attempts at finding a parking space. Not a GOOD parking space, understand... ANY parking space. It was a zoo.

A friend of mine actually calls Wal-Mart "the Cheyenne Zoo," but for a different reason. His view is that on display there is every rare species of human. The whole gene pool... and there's no lifeguard on duty. Kids are crying, Darth Vader toys are breathing heavily, Nemo is trying to find himself, and packs of adults are rummaging through gargantuan bins piled high with five dollar DVDs. Cart wheels squeak, cell phones ring. Men with three or four beers in them talk too loudly. Lord, please don't let there be Wal-Mart on the new earth! I want to forget it ever existed!

Is. 65:17 “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind."

One pleasure I did experience today was reading "The Faith of the Pilgrims" by Robert Bartlett. The book does assume you have prior knowledge that you probably don't have (at least I don't), but overall it's fantastic. When I was a child, I never knew that the Pilgrims were anything other than people with belt buckles on their shoes who came over on the Mayflower to have dinner with the indians. Even piecing the story together from factoids picked up later in life didn't come close to revealing the true nature of why they traveled to the new world.

I'm really looking forward to teaching that study. But based on what I've read already, I can tell that it's gonna be lengthy, 'cause I don't want to trim out any of the information! Only the limited length of C-62 Master Cassette saves the parishoners at Calvary Chapel from being subjected to two-hour studies on a regular basis! Paul the apostle didn't have that limitation, of course. But it was killing people...

Acts 20:7,9 ...Paul began talking to them, intending to leave the next day, and he prolonged his message until midnight ... And there was a young man named Eutychus sitting on the window sill, sinking into a deep sleep; and as Paul kept on talking, he was overcome by sleep and fell down from the third floor and was picked up dead.

Once the man was miraculously healed...

Acts 20:11 ...he talked with them a long while until daybreak, and then left.

Now THAT'S a study!