When you go to a play, or watch a movie, if it’s a good one, then you get pulled into the story. You start to identify with the characters. You put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself how you would react if you were in their situation. The really good stories help us discover things about ourselves.
Death is a Thief
I found a website that tracks violence in the city of Chicago. So far this year—as of Friday, anyway—there have been 93 people shot and killed in Chicago. 426 have been shot and wounded. There has been a total of 113 homicides in the Chicagoland area. In Chicago, a person is murdered, on average, every 18 hours and 41 minutes.
Sam pulled his coat tighter and reached for another piece of trash.
It had been four weeks since the stock market had crashed and his office had been abruptly closed. Four fruitless weeks of walking the streets looking for a job that didn’t exist. One of thousands of unemployed men in a 1929 economy that simply wasn’t hiring.
John 4:43-54 The Grave Robber: Long Distance Miracle
There Must Be a Faster Way
Samuel Morse was a painter. He grew up in New England and studied in the Royal Academy of London. He preferred “romantic” paintings of sweeping landscapes and epic events. People liked his work, and he was commissioned to paint House of Representatives, a then-famous depiction of a night session of Congress.
Cut and Paste Bible
The Smithsonian museum in Washington has on display a leather-bound book in which Thomas Jefferson pasted all the passages from the gospels that contain no miraculous elements. For Jefferson, who believed in the ethical teaching of Jesus but could not stomach the idea of the supernatural, this was a more palatable version of the Bible and the one he read every day toward the end of his life.