Words from a Branch

Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. Psalm 139:16 ESV             What is true of the psalmist is also true of Jeremiah, Jeremiah 1:5, it is true of all of us according to Ephesians 2:10, and in Matthew 10:29-31.   The admonitions the Bible makes against anxiety are not unreasonable, but have the very best reasons behind them. The best of all these good reasons is that the Christian is in the hands of loving God. John 6:37-39 tells us this is the safest place we could possibly be. Our souls are secure in life everlasting.             As for our days on this Earth they are numbered friend. They are all accounted for in God’s book. We have only so many. And for those of us in Christ this good, for death is the doorway to a better life. There is simply no...

What if we could move through time the way we move through space? What if we could revisit not just the location, but the actual place we knew? To step back into the world we once inhabited, exactly the way we left it, the way we remember it. Recapture the fullness of what was, realizing it as what is. What would we do?             I dream of walking back into that world where the sun seemed to shine brighter, the air was fresher, the sky more vibrant... In my memory the former places just keep getting better. I go back to where they existed, and wonder why they have been forsaken, or abandoned, or destroyed, or simply changed. I wonder why it was not frozen forever in the moment when i was part of it. I am always aware of a profound sorrow lingering faintly in the back of my mind when I survey the places where I used to belong. It is as if I am haunted by my own ghost, watching the echoes of myself retracing the paths and rep...