parables of a prodigal world

I was recently feeding my year-and-a-half old son a bowl of Cheerios. Its one of my favorite pastimes. We sit on the kitchen table, me on the chair and him on my lap, looking out the window, him with one spoon to play choo-choo and me with one to sneak in an occasional spoonful into his mouth. As he starts to get full, he likes to take a spoonful and spill it onto the table. I don't mind if its a piece of cereal or two, but he eventually moves up to a whole spoonful, which creates quite a mess, so I tell him "nooo," and he stops. Usually. On this last occasion, he did something that really tickled me, at first, and then really got me thinking. He prepared a heaping spoonful to spill onto the table, heard me say "noooo," looked sheepishly into my eyes as if contemplating something, pointed out the window and said, "Look!" and proceeded to spill the heaping spoonful onto the table. My 1-1/2 year old son has learned the art of diverting my attention in o...

As anyone who starts their day with a cup of Starbucks will know, the cups are sometimes graced with a random thought from a random person, under the general banner "The Way I See It." The Way I See It #230 reads as follows: "Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but Heaven has to step it up a bit. They’re basically getting by because they only have to be better than Hell." Pretty interesting challenge to anyone who takes this whole Christianity thing seriously, on quite a few levels. What are you and I doing to perpetuate this man-on-the-street perception of the ultimate Christian hope? What are we doing to challenge it? Is it worth the effort? I was speaking to a Christian friend about the ultimate Christian hope, the confusion about heaven versus the promise of ...