“We all have our ups and downs.” So goes the old cliche’. When we’re “down” life can seem like a crazy-quilt-stitched together, as it were, without pattern or design. Life becomes a series of unrelated events, and because it lacks a wholesome sense of continuity, we feel incomplete, fragmented, unfulfilled. No one, it seems, is exempt from that old “down” feeling. The sense of discontinuity and nonfulfillment intrudes in the lives of the rich and the poor, the young and the old. There is the story of an elderly shopkeeper who was on his deathbed. As his family gathered about him, he said, “Is Mother here?” “Yes,” his wife answered. “Is Sarah here,” he asked. “Yes, Father.” “And Robert?” “Yes, Father.” The old man raised himself from the pillow and cried out anxiously, “Then who’s minding the store?”
Continuity and fulfillment is a persistent New Testament theme. Things rarely happen as isolated events. What happens at one time is anticipated in what went before;…
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