Church Relic - Spine of Christ ?

I spent this past week in Versailles, just outside Paris.
We took an evening dinner cruise on the Seine and a friend pointed out historical landmarks including the Louvre, Notre Dame and of course the Eifle tower.

In the course of her narrative she mentioned a few lesser known churches. One in particular, she observed, even had a famous relic retrieved by an earlier French King. As she recalled, it was the "spine of Christ."

My natural inclination was to continue listening to her kind descriptions. Afterall, there are countless relics in churches all over the world. Who knows which fragments are real and which are not. Even a local Basilica near our home has what they claim to be a piece of the One True Cross. Anyway, it was not an evening for debate, but of fellowship and beautiful Parisian views.

When I returned home, I recapped the week's events for my family and included reference to the "spine of Christ" relic.
My daughter immediately said, "Oops, that's not right."
In the instant she said that, I finally made the same connection and thought, "Oh my. Jesus' resurrected body left behind no bones of any kind, let alone his spine!"

What an opportunity for evangelism I had missed! How simple to have asked my host, "Are you sure they meant the spine of Christ? That would be at odds with the Christian belief that he arose from the dead." There were hundreds of ways I could have said that. I was thinking like a tourist, not a Believer. (Happily, my daughter is more on the ball than I am !)

A quick online search revealed several mentions of "spine" and "Christ" in Paris. But they refer to the crown of thorns. Evidently the connecting fragments to the thorns are called "the spine." Somehow my friend must have mixed what she heard about churches, relics and Christ, to misunderstand the "spine of Christ's thorns" to be "the spine of Christ." It is now my turn to respond back to her and ask if that is indeed the case. There is still an opportunity for the Gospel to be shared.

Matthew 27:29
"They wove thorn branches into a crown and put it on his head, and they placed a reed stick in his right hand as a scepter. Then they knelt before him in mockery and taunted, "Hail! King of the Jews!""

What do you believe?

Praying for friends in Japan

Please pray for the people of Japan; for safety, recovery, comfort, reassurance and hope.

We have friends there and you may as well. It must seem an impossible situation to overcome.

Matthew 19:26

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

What do you believe?

Let's Pray

We have a simple way of starting prayer at our house.

Someone says, "let's pray." (One of the pastors at our church used to say, "Okie dokie, let's pray," but that's another story.)
It doesn't take a whole lot of commotion to get started. You need have nothing fancy to say. Whatever comes from the heart - and Holy Spirit - after "let's pray," is enough for God to work with. We end by saying, "...in Jesus' name, Amen."
"Please watch over our gathering.
Please bring our daughter and son safely home from their travels.
Please guide our decision in this matter." In Jesus' name, Amen.

I've been through a particularly pressure-filled time at work lately. In one of my meetings last week I dearly wanted to start by saying, "let's pray," because I truly felt inadequate to the task at hand on my own. I didn't say it, of course. It would have been inappropriate in the work setting and I have no quarrels with that. But political correctness is also censoring religious free speech and thought in my non-work, public settings - in the formerly free United States. Activists proactively block us from praying "in Jesus name" at public events.

My own job stress will pass. There are much worse pressure-filled situations throughout the world today. Dangerous, shooting the civilian population-type situations. Overthrowing the government situations. Elected officials refusing to participate in established democratic processes of the republic-type situations. Even the stress of heartbreaking natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamais.

But coincident with many of these dangerous places where people are firing on their constituents, they have also dictated that submission to one particular prophet is law - and it is literally life threatening to pray "in Jesus' name." They burn churches, and murder converts. That goes way beyond the simmering decorum of our USA secular political correctness.

A word of caution though, both ideologies are aggressively intent on eliminating the same practice. What prevents one from becoming more like the other?

Let's pray.

What do you believe?