Marriage

A wife came in to see a lawyer about getting a divorce. He said, "Do you have grounds?" She said, "Well we have about one acre." He said, "No, I mean does he have a grudge?" She said, "No, but he has a carport." He said, "What I mean is do you wake up grumpy?" She said, "No, I just let him sleep." Exasperated he said, "Does...

Man

Not long ago newspapers carried a misleading story. The story was that a machine had beaten a man at the game of chess. That is not really true. A chess champion did play against a computer. That's true. And the computer won. That's true. But it took five computer programmers and a chess Grand Master as a consultant to...

Luck

In the nineteenth century in Lancashire, England there was a common superstition regarding New Year's Day. If a light haired man, or any female, was the first to enter the house that morning it would bring bad luck all year long. There developed then a custom of dark haired men going from house to house to bring good luck...

Love

No doubt Jean Anoulih was speaking of romantic love in these words: "Love is, above all, the gift of oneself." But those words are also true of Christian love. No doubt W. Somerset Maugham was speaking of romantic love when he wrote, "The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love." But those...

Heaven

Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq has built 50 palaces at a probable cost of two billion dollars. Each one has an underground bunker covered by concrete two feet thick reinforced with steel. They can withstand the blast of a five hundred pound bomb. Some are so far beneath the ground they could withstand a nuclear attack...

Evangelism

Just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in the mountains of western North Carolina is an interesting phenomenon called the Brown Mountain Lights. The lights are best seen on a hazy summer evening and have never been fully explained. Some think it is the incandescent glow from rotting wood -- a natural phenomenon called foxfire...

Dying Words

It is said that William Pitt the Younger, when he was dying, said, "My country! How I love my country!" Shakespeare put these dying words on the lips of Hamlet, "the rest is silence." William Saroyan telephoned to the AP before he died in 1981: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in...

Divine Presence

Once the Hapsburgs ruled most of Europe. Today only one little country is ruled by a Hapsburg - Liechtenstein. It is 1/250th the size of Switzerland. It has a castle and the royal family lives there. But that has not always been the case. There was a time in history when the ruling family of Liechtenstein did not even come to...

The Cup

Edinburgh, Scotland has a new museum with objects depicting the land's long and varied history. There are ancient rock carvings and almost modern furniture as it might have been seen in a Glasgow tea room at the turn of the century. No object is more interesting than an ornamental drinking cup. Robert the Bruce and and his...

Contradictions

In his great painting The Blue Cloak Peter Bruegel has incorporated at least 78 proverbs, maxims, rhymes and symbols. One shows a woman carrying fire in her right hand and a bucket of water in the left. It is a depiction of an old proverb. To say "she carries fire in one hand and water in the other" means that she holds two...