Genesis 17: 1-16 (links validated 2/8/24)

In one of his books, Thomas Long tells a story in which a woman was reminiscing about her father. When she was young, she was very close to her father. She experienced that closeness the most when they would have big family gatherings with all the aunts and uncles and cousins. Inevitably, someone would pull out an old record player and play polka records, and the family would dance. Whenever the “Beer Barrel Polka” would begin, her father would come up to her, tap her on the shoulder and say, “I believe this is our dance.” Then they would dance. However, one time when she was a teenager and in one of those teenaged moods, as the “Beer Barrel Polka” began to play, her father said, “I believe this is our dance,” but she snapped, “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” So her father turned away and never asked her to dance again. She wrote, “Our relationship was difficult all through my teen years. “When I would come home late from a date, my father would be sitting there in his chair, half asleep, wearing an old bathrobe, and I would snarl at him, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ He would look at me with sad eyes and say, ‘I was just waiting on you.’ […] When I went away to college, I was so glad to get out of his house and away from him and for years I never communicated with him, but as I grew older, I began to miss him. “One day I decided to go to the next family gathering, and somebody put on the ‘Beer Barrel Polka.’ I drew a deep breath, walked over to my father, tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘I believe this is our dance.’ He turned toward me and said, 'I’ve been waiting on you.’” Tom Long adds, “Standing at the center of our life is the God who says to us, ‘Everything I have is yours. All that I am is for you, and I’ve been waiting on you.’”...

My wife’s brother Doug lives in the foothills above Fort Collins, Colorado. Their backyard opens on the city’s reservoir, which means they can go swimming and boating immediately outside their house — not that they probably do much of that in this weather. One of our favorite places to go when we visit Doug and his family is Estes Park, a colorful small town up in the mountains, which is situated at the entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s about an hour long drive from Fort Collins which takes you through the Big Thompson River Canyon. As you drive along that highway, you see see the steep canyon walls on either side of the road and a number of small fishing cabins scattered alongside the Big Thompson River, which isn’t big at all. Instead, it’s more like a narrow mountain stream. Rumor even has it that mountain goats sometimes play on the sides of those steep cliffs, although I’ve never seen any of them there. In any case, it’s been an almost idyllic setting every time we’ve been there. However, that wasn’t the case on July 31, 1976. On that day, a storm stalled over the canyon, causing it to drop 12 inches of rain in just four hours. The canyon acted more or less as a funnel, channeling all of that water urgently downstream, forming a wall of water 20 feet high. That flash flood resulted in the deaths of 143 people...

In the April 1997 issue of Readers Digest, Clarence Hall tells of his trip to see the Christian sites in Israel. He happened to be in Jerusalem on Easter morning, so he very much wanted to attend the Easter sunrise service at the Garden Tomb, one of the two places thought to be possible locations for Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection. Hall was so excited about the service that he couldn’t sleep; the night before seemed endless. In his anxiety, he turned to the Christian Arab who had promised to be his guide and asked him if the night would ever end. Here’s how he describes what happened next, “Abdul’s face in the candle light rebuked me. ‘Never fear, my friend. The day will come. You can’t hold back the dawn.’...