A boat.
What’s a boat?
It floats.
What’s that?
What did Noah do for a living before that? How did he support his family while building the ark? Where’d he get so much wood? How did he explain to his neighbors?
Here’s a trivia question… how many of each animal did he put onboard? Bet 99 out of 100 people get that wrong! (See Genesis 7:1-3)
As I looked at the beautiful stylized gold-colored cross on the back wall of our church sanctuary this morning, I thought how clean, how neat, how spotless, how sanitized, how painless it looked. Blood-free.
The Holy Spirit began speaking to me, as he often does when I’m meditating on something.
“Try seeing an electric chair fastened to that wall,” he said, “a hangman’s noose or a guillotine blade.”
I thought about those things for a moment, visualizing them clean and empty.
“Now try seeing one of those being used, smell the odor of burning flesh or the gush of bright red blood.”
It took a while for me to get those images out of my mind, as the praise team sang “At the foot of the cross.”
We don’t mind standing at the foot of a pristine, blood-less cross affixed to the sanctuary wall. I’m not sure we would have been able to stand at the foot of the real one, knowing the only reason he was there was us.
Esther's Petition 