T. David Beck: The Simple Way of Jesus

Sometimes it feels like life is one long wrestling match against a stronger opponent. Very few things come easily. How we come through life's many challenges is a matter of having a biblical perspective and some practical steps to take. Our family bought a house this summer. The inspector said, "For a 60-year-old house, this place is in great shape." He went on to say those magical words: "it has really good bones." Well, no sooner did we move in than things stopped working and we discovered all sorts of problems. One morning Susan was turning on the shower, and the shower handle came off in her hand. You know, stuff like that. On the more serious side, when Sacramento got its first good rain of the year, I came home to find water dripping steadily from the ceiling in the living room onto one of the television speakers we had bought five days earlier. Living in this house has felt like a wrestling match in which I'm being outpointed rather badly. At ...

I have heard the story of Squanto and the earliest Thanksgiving, but I have never appreciated the miraculous nature of Squanto's role in the lives of the pilgrims. I was surfing around on Justin Taylor's blog Between Two Worlds and ran across a post about Thanksgiving . Taylor posts a CNN interview with Eric Metaxas, who wrote a children's book, Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving , in 1999. Metaxas looks at the Squanto story through the eyes of faith, and his account is powerful. Here is the point that grabbed my attention the most. Metaxas observes how after his village was wiped out by smallpox, Squanto was emotionally broken and was living in the woods by himself. In the settlement, the pilgrims were struggling for survival, half of them having died over the course of a brutal winter. They too were completely broken. Squanto appears out of the woods and helps them survive. Metaxas observes that in this story, God takes broken people and weaves them together, cre...