So I was talking with my buddies Paul and Matt the other day, and Paul was all,
Where, O death, is your sting?
Oh man. You have no idea how hard it was for me to not sarcastically retort, "It's in my heart, Paul, where do you think it is?"
Well, okay, so I was listening to Matt Maher's Christ is Risen, which references Paul's 1 Corinthians 15.54-55 taunt at the wages of sin:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
It's that time again, when young men and women prepare to have their baptisms confirmed, when the Holy Spirit is asked to descend upon them as He did the Apostles at the first Pentecost.
This year I was asked to give a talk to some of our confirmation students about how the Holy Spirit has acted in my life. What follows is what I prepared for them. When I speak, I do not follow my text exactly, I give room for the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and so this is different from the talks I gave, just as each of the talks were different from each other. Hopefully this will still speak to you in some way.
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit are these:
We are asked time and again if we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, usually by a Protestant who is attempting to evangelize. It is an important question! But have you ever been asked if you have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit?
Consider yourself asked. Do you have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit? If not, why not?
This Thanksgiving, my son Gabriel should have been 10 weeks old.
Instead, this Thanksgiving was the 3 week anniversary of his death.
November 6th, 2014, we woke up to get ready for our day, and Gabriel didn't. There is an abyss waiting for me in that moment, waiting to swallow me.
Fortunately, this guy's watching over his daddy. Maybe it's just me, but that looks like a guy who gets his way. "Really, dad? Despair? You know where I am!"
I know son. Doesn't make me miss you less.