Daily Devotion

I have been blogging for years, long before it was the popular or necessary thing to do. I started with two sites, Ordinary Encounters, where I wrote about encountering God in the ordinary and Plains Truth Journal where I detailed life living in a small city located on the plains of Kansas. That blog eventually became the host for the bi-weekly op-ed articles that I wrote for the Emporia Gazette, the local paper. It was once a very famous paper, but like all news print has been in decline since the advent of the internet made newspapers redundant. But, it was a pleasure writing at the time. A few years later, I added the blog Daily Devotion as a place to record my thoughts on reading through the Bible on a yearly basis. I was great at that for a couple of years until the op-ed writing and life in general, got in the way.

We have since left our small city and moved back to Kansas City, buying a house in an old historic neighborhood only a few blocks from where my parents were living when my brothers and I were born. I have come full circle. There is something about a change of scenery that changes your perspective. Where I had gotten tired of blogging after living in the same town for twenty years, moving has given me a fresh look at the world around me.

I am gradually migrating all of my blogs over to this new hosting platform and will be adding new content as well. If you’re interested in what I my blogs looked like before I moved them to WordPress, you can check them out here:

Ordinary Encounters

Plains Truth Journal

Daily Devotion

This comment from December 31, 2009, explains the rationale behind this blog.

Last week I watched the movie “Julie & Julia” and was struck by how Julie’s persistence in blogging about trying to cook from Julia Child’s cookbook each day resulted in an improvement in both her cooking and her dedication to the craft of writing. That is what I am going to attempt to do here, although I don’t expect anyone to ever find this blog or view the contents, I intend for this to be a record of my thoughts in reading through the Bible over the course of one year. I have read through the Bible many times and journaled a good portion of that time, but I have never recorded specifically what I have found from each passage on a daily basis. This will be my first attempt at that. Ultimately, I would like to experience the same results that Julie did with her blog. I would like to become more devoted to the lover of my soul and at the same time become a better writer. So here goes…

I have maintained a blog by this name since then on another platform. Times change and I found myself posting less and less. After a lengthy hiatus during which we relocated from our small college town to the city where I was born, I am ready to rededicated myself to putting down my observations as I make my annual pilgrimage through God’s word.

God, the Creator of all things, knew what was good.  He looked at his creation, including mankind, as it came into being and pronounced,  ‘It is good!’  Day and night, sea and land, animals and vegetation, even man himself, all of God’s creation was good.  God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. – Gen. 1:31 NIV 

God gave man a beautiful garden with all that was needed  to sustain life and withheld only one thing; the knowledge of good and evil.  We did not need to know about evil, God was protecting us from that.  All we needed to know was that what God provided was complete and good.  But, as everyone knows, that was not enough for man, or woman, as in the case of Eve.  Instead of trusting God they wanted to know it all.  They were pro-choice and look at the results,  for them in the beginning and down through the ages.   The question that remains for me is what would I have done if I were the first one to come face-to-face with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  Would I want the choice?  Would I have trusted God that his plan for me was only good and that I didn’t need to know what evil was all about?  I’m afraid, that faced with the temptation of being able to know about evil, I would have chosen knowledge over trust as has been the case many times in my life. I have wanted to see what evil was, perhaps not be carried down to the depths with it, but I have wanted to taste it, and in doing so, I have suffered the same disastrous results that Adam and Eve suffered.  I have seen myself as I really am.  Not a pretty sight.  God loved his creation.  He only wanted the best for us.  But he also gave us free will and we usually decide that we want to be the one to make the choice. It’s not so much a question of good versus evil.  Good and evil have always existed.  It’s that desire to be able to choose between the two that trips us up every time.