Month: November 2008

We are working with a client today for whom we did some work last year. When we worked for them last year, it came at a time when we were extraordinarily busy with other clients.

This client had some real issues with our software and some of those issues were beyond our control and so we never fixed them. I am a nice man, but if I had been in their shoes, I would not have been nearly as nice as they treated us. They were always gracious and patient and are even a referenceable client, even though, by all rights, they really shouldn’t be.

When this project came up for us to do some more work for them, I told my developer about our history with them. I told her, “I would like to be so good to them and so responsive so as to earn the way they’ve treated us in the past.”

Afterwards, I reflected on this and realized that this is really what grace is all about. God‘s salvation is like a line of credit that has been extended to us for free and we never have to pay back. We are free to draw on it as needed to deal with whatever we need through life with no strings attached.

Christian maturity though, is that one day, maybe, we’ll become the person God wanted us to be when he extended his grace to us in the first place, in a way, earning grace.

It also occurs to me that this is why we are supposed to do unto others as you would have them do to you. We extend God’s grace to others in the hope that they will one day live up to the gift that’s been given to all of us.

God help me to be gracious and peaceful so that I may also be a good example of your amazing grace.

God is Amazing! As a single guy, I only know this because it was pointed out to me by a woman, but you can’t wear red and orange together. They clash.

I was thinking about this the other day while driving around town and looking at the trees. Have you ever noticed that a bright orange tree and deep red tree look just fine together. In fact, you could have purple flowers, blue ones, bright green foliage, and a ruby-throated hummingbird all jammed together in a very small garden and the colors would all look beautiful together.

It’s just an observation, but it’s really heart changing when you think about it: None of God’s colors clash!

The problem with red and orange is not fundamental to the colors but to our ability to make copies of what God did. If I were given a palette and primary colors of paint to start mixing with, how many colors could I mix before I found one color that clashed with another? Maybe half a dozen? My niece is an artist, so she could maybe mix 15 or 20.

But there are millions of colors in creation and all of them look great together.

I’ve seen sunrises that would take your breath away. I have stood on the beach and watched the purplish dark slowly give way to oranges and reds and then he yellow sun would pop out of the blue-green water. The sky filled with all shades and hues of these colors in close proximity and they all look great together.

What kind of a genius is our God that he can create a whole world of color and not one single clash among them?

It’s one thing to look at a giraffe, which has the highest blood pressure of any mammal to drive the blood all the way up their neck to their brain. I mean, survival of the fittest makes a little bit of sense when you see how the ones with the longer necks survived better and reproduced.

But did you know that their blood pressure is so high that if they bent over to drink water and their brain went below their hear that the blood pressure would blow apart the blood vessels in their head and they’d die instantly? It turns out that giraffes have a pressure valve at the base of their skull that returns the blood to their heart.

What kind of a sane person can look at creation and say, “Yeah! That all happened by accident?” And scientists think we’re crazy for believing in something we can’t see.

How can you not? God is amazing.