Life In Greencastle

"Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee ..." - Matthew 28:16 Ten-Year-Old Me I hated going to church when I was ten years old.   Yeah, that's where I want to begin:  the fact that ten-year-old Wes loathed going to church with my family on Sunday mornings. True story.  Back in 1989, on Sunday mornings at around 8:30 am at our home at 965 Maxwell Lane in the Colony Woods subdivision of Zionsville, Indiana, you probably would have found me hiding in my bed.  You wouldn't have known, perhaps, that I was hiding.  It would have just looked like I was sleeping in my bed - eyes closed, deep breathes and all.  But, I wasn't sleeping.  I was pretending - pretending not to hear my mom calling up the stairs to my sisters and me, pretending not to hear her tell us us to get up and get ready for church.   Every Sunday I would indulge in this fantasy.  Sunday after Sunday I would dangle out the hope that maybe if I stayed in bed long enough and pretended ...

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you ... In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials ..." - 1 Peter 1:3-4, 7        I've been thinking about old man Abraham, stumbling around from place to place with God's promise knocking around in his mind:  a promise from Yahweh to do wonderful things for he and Sarah.  "I'm going to make of you a great nation," Yahweh said (Gen. 12:2).  Then Yahweh expanded the promise, declaring that God would use Abraham to bless other nations (Gen. 12:2).  And then one more time, Yahweh made a third promise, this one even more specific and wildly audacious.  "Listen," Yahweh said, "no one but your very own son shall be your heir" (G...