From my Barnabas, my friend Jim, behold still more evidence of God’s creativity:

Cooper’s Hawk …

And sundry others (all by unguided material forces, say the atheists!).

Over recent days I have led another marriage retreat for soldiers and their wives and children. It did not hurt that this retreat was on the Florida panhandle. The sands are white; the Gulf is often translucent; the dolphins hunt just a few meters out into the water and you can see them in the first hour of daylight and the last hour of daylight, almost without fail. Their rounded dorsal fins emerge from underneath, slicing through the sea with ease, and one can lose himself in the view.

One morning before we began to equip the married couples, one of the chaplains said, “Jon, let’s pray.” And we huddled up in a moment of prayer for the weekend, for God to till hearts and to use us for his purposes. My wife snapped a photo of the moment, it seems.

One afternoon thunderstorms appeared to be forming for their brief refreshing cameo and a small rainbow scene formed above us. I was captured by the scene of the bird flying below the rainbow.

Below are some of the couples we were able to minister to.

I walked the beach with my wife and son. We saw the countless fowl, some fishing, some frolicing, some waiting for sunbathers to throw them scraps.

As I drove back to post I crossed the river for my umpteenth time and felt nonetheless a current of kinship with Huck and Jim (yes, I know they are literary characters, but they live in the lives of those of us who understand), so moved was I by the river’s inexorable flow to the Gulf.

I am quite tired now but thankful, and prayerful that something was said, or done, or perhaps lived out whereby the sovereign hand of the One to whom we will answer may grip these soldiers, their wives and children, and we may come to understand and appreciate the God who authors the seas, the skies, the slice of the dolphins’ fins, the colors of the gulls’ wings, the pastiche of colors in the rainbow before a Florida thundershower, the way people’s feet leave temporary prints in the sands before the waves take them out to the sea again.

I am so thankful to have this ministry and to have a wife who’s indispensable to any success I may’ve had, my co-laborer in the faith, the one whose hand I hold on the beach each and every time.

Dolphins began feeding. Here’s the link:

And the birds gathered ’round me as I read and prepared for the soldiers and families to arrive:

Books. Specifically, true ones. Books that herald truth. Books that expose false worldviews. Books that demonstrate veracity via evidence.

When sleep will not come, bibliophiles do what we do: we turn the leaves of another volume.

Over the last 36 hours, I read–once again–one of my enduring favorite theologians/pastors/writers.

I cannot say that he’ll ever surpass Jonathan Edwards for me, but he and Machen and Sproul are treasures nonetheless.

His name, of course, is D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. And the two volumes I read again were Authority and Truth Unchanged, Unchanging.

Both pieces were penned and taught/preached in the 1950s.

That amazes me in one formidable sense. The same ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ and ‘scientific’ propaganda was being peddled then, and the gospel shattered it and outlived it, just as promised.

The good doctor of the soul wrote where all might take up and read, see and understand, and come to our senses.

Blessed be the faithful Lloyd-Jones and the glorious truths he faithfully expounded in words and in deeds.

Reminders of what?

“God’s works of providence are his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions” (WSC, 11A).

The transliteration is koinónia. It is κοινωνία in the Greek. It is usually translated into English as fellowship. Synonymns are “sharing in communion” or “participation/fellowship in the spirit.” Why the dive into words? In short, because they matter. In Scripture, the word occurs twenty times. Each time, it is associated with fellowship, enjoying a common joy communally because the members share a common relationship of Christian bonds.

This weekend I was able, once again, to be with some folks I adore. A couple from class opened their home to us and we brought food and the appetites. The hosts, too, prepared food and their home, and the Lord used the koinonia to encourage his saints.

We gathered ’round the tables spread with the labors of the ladies. The host prayed. We dug in. We laughed. We ate ham and potatoes and macaroni and apple pie and brownies and sweet potatoes and ice cream, and some sipped coffee or drank sweet tea. And some of us went back for seconds. More casseroles, meatballs, dirty rice, broccoli and cheese, and on and on. It was all delightful–the food, the beautiful home, the sunny Saturday afternoon.

I was sitting on our hosts’ back porch with six or seven other men, plates of goodness on our laps, and we chatted of the blessings of our church, of the gospel, and we watched three whitetails cross quietly across the backyard, just inside the line of trees. I am like a boy still when it comes to relishing nature. I watched the deer as they in turn watched us. I love to see them and the way their black eyes pulse with awareness, the way they stomp to alert the other deer that, “Hey, watch out. There are people over there!” kind of communications. Their long taut ears rotate back and forth like brown satellites, absorbing the intel.

Then a hummingbird came up and started feeding from the lilies behind the house, too. Beautiful. Little trumpet-shaped lilies just a few feet the other side of the screened-in porch. The hummingbird’s silent wings flapped soundlessly but with breathtaking rapidity.

And earlier that day, a friend from the group, my buddy Jim whom I call my Barnabas, had emailed me photos of his favorite birds, the ruby-throated hummingbird, and it was again witnessing natural theology displayed, God speaking through the things he has made.

Sometimes when I think on such things, I look back in shame at the time I was a secularist. I had no one to thank for beauty. The universe in a secular worldview is just a cosmic accident, after all. It makes no sense to thank matter. Gratitude only makes sense if the world is superintended by personality. In other words, it’s God’s world and he has communicated part of his nature by the things he has made (all of us creatures).

That’s why poets write of trees and breezes and dawns and gloamings and why sonnets are penned of beautiful women the poets loved and why poet e.e. cummings wrote spring was puddle-wonderful and mud-luscious.

As I drove back to my place this evening, the cup of my soul was full. I had fellowshipped with the saints; I had talked with a sweet friend of our common love for all things C.S. Lewis; I had been encouraged by fellow men and women who see the world as God has revealed it, broken but beautiful, awaiting redemption.

Lilies, whitetails, hummingbirds, food, fellowship … and, well, koinonia. It’s enough to make you say, Thank you. And to understand why gratitude is fitting.

Piece 1: I don’t think I had ever read Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde until this week. Not sure how I missed it but it reminded me of a theological truism: man is capable of both great good and great evil. For much of the novella, I was confused. Who was being critiqued? Was it Jekyll, Hyde, Utterson, or Lanyon?

I am a rather dedicated reader, so I hoped I was not guilty of not paying close enough attention to the story as I read and pondered. Eventually, however, the story came into clearer view for me, like I was emerging from a fog onto a clear sea with the shore again in view.

Stevenson was exploring dualities of good and evil, of course, but also worldviews. Is the universe a closed system? Is there no transcendence? If so, on what grounds is anything objectively good or evil? Objective good and evil presuppose a transcendent standard by which to define the terms.

Were the universe a closed system, who gets to define what is ghastly, sordid, or wrong? Why would Hyde’s behavior in the novella be deemed evil in a closed universe? If one were logically consistent, he could not use moral categories because there would be no God or objective morality.

But the fact that we are repulsed by Hyde’s behaviors demonstrates the Romans 1 and Romans 2 salvos of truth–that the law of God is written on our hearts and that we are without excuse.

Piece 2: This week I received an email from a member of our Sunday school class with a devotional in it that came from reading the Old Testament prophet Amos. Specifically, Amos 6:1 was explored. That verse reads, just in the first part of the line, “Woe to those are at ease in Zion.” Why the oracle of woe? Because God is, because he is holy, and because he judges sin. He cannot overlook sin. Otherwise he would not be holy.

Amos is replete with the image of God setting a plumb line in the midst of his people (7:8). In Amos we see that God is, that God is just, that God deals with sin and with us sinners. It’s not a closed universe. There is objective good and objective evil.

Hyde was a moral monster, to go back to Stevenson’s novella. But that is the wicked human heart. Amos the prophet called out to his generation, and his word still calls out to each generation with the offer of the gospel of hope. But we have to embrace it via repentance and faith in the true God, the true Christ, the true gospel.

Piece 3: Today I was leading a small Christian worship service with some young soldiers. One of the lieutenants said to me as we chatted, “Chaplain, I was at your last service. I really liked it. You taught the Bible, not other stuff.” Then I asked him to tell me his story. He was a college graduate, and married. He and his wife have their first child due in a few months. Then he told me something that really resonated with me. He said, “We found a solid church. And they sing the great hymns. It’s not all the drivel. And they root everything in the Bible. My wife and I love it, chaplain.”

Takeaway: I reflected upon this week’s ministry, and after having read about Jekyll & Hyde, and having gone back and read through Amos again, and pondered on the encouraging words from that lieutenant today, and having thought about how many of the great hymns teach biblical theology, and lamented the drivel that so often characterizes so much ‘praise and worship’ music currently, I still was encouraged.

I was encouraged. Why? Because some do see. Some have spiritual eyes and ears to know the truth when they hear it. They recognize that the universe is not closed, that God has spoken, that judgment is real, and that God has indeed set a plumb line in his world.

Most of all, perhaps, I was encouraged because I’d taught from Luke 8 today before I’d chatted with the lieutenant. And the last verse I’d focused on was verse 15: “As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.”

Holding the truth fast in an honest and good heart. That’s a work only God can begin and complete in our hearts–our hearts, which are so often more like Hydes than Jekylls. But thanks be to God, God has done what we neither would do nor could do without divine grace–quickened the spiritually dead, created Pauls from Sauls, rebuked Jonahs to go to Nineveh, after all, with the great good news of the gospel.

From my Barnabas, my encourager-friend, Jim, here are some August beauties: