sins – Page 2 – The Faith Cafe

Posted on November 13, 2023October 18, 2023 by Lori Cartmell

Shine Your Light!

If you’re fumbling around in the darkness, what should you do?

Turn on a light, of course.

But there are places on earth where this truism can have unexpected effects.

The “midnight zone” of oceans is one of them.

This zone, ranging from about 3,000 to 13,000 feet below the water’s surface, is in constant darkness. The sun’s rays simply cannot penetrate this far down.

The only light at this extreme depth comes from the bioluminescence of various sea creatures themselves.

Scientists who want to study the sea life in this region are faced with a problem. Normally, if you want to examine a dark area, you’d simply shine a light into it. Indeed, the submersibles scientists use for underwater research have headlights for this express purpose.

But casting a light on the creatures in the midnight zone freaks them out. They’re not used to bright light, and assume it’s some sort of enemy.

Startled swordfish will attempt kamikaze runs at a submersible’s lights. Other creatures are blinded or are plunged into terror by the blazing illumination: they either freeze or flee.

Scientists soon realized that their submersibles’ lights were simply creating a no-go zone around the vessel, hampering their research. So they switched to using a red light, a colour which most of the undersea creatures can’t see.

Sometimes light can have a contradictory effect, can’t it?

As believers we see this when we introduce the light of Christ to others.

Posted on May 1, 2023April 10, 2023 by Lori Cartmell

Conspicuous Camouflage

Image of blue tang fish by Tewy via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-2.5

Whenever I did something wrong as a little girl, I thought I had a surefire way of escaping my parents.

I would hide behind a large potted plant we had and close my eyes.

Somehow, I thought that my parents wouldn’t be able to see me if I did this. Unfortunately for me, their eyesight was a bit better than I’d bargained on.

If you look at the natural world, you’ll find that I’m not the only one who often thinks they can’t be seen.

Take the blue tang fish, made famous by its cartoon equivalent in the Pixar movies “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory.”

Like a few other reef fish, this aquatic animal is blue and yellow. To other fish and to its predators, the blue tang is perfectly camouflaged. To them, its yellow markings seem to disappear against similarly coloured corals, and its blue body blends in with the shade of the water.

There’s only one problem:

To snorkelling humans, the blue tang sticks out like a sore thumb. Far from being camouflaged, this fish’s dramatic colours are incredibly conspicuous to our eyes. Why is that?

It’s because our eyesight is very different from that of undersea creatures. The particular trio of cones in human vision is especially good at discriminating blues and yellows.

So what is hidden to other fish is glaringly obvious to us.

I think God’s “eyesight” works in a similar fashion.

Posted on April 3, 2023February 20, 2023 by Lori Cartmell

New Life From Broken Eggs

There is often great beauty in simple things. Take the egg, for instance.

Even a plain white egg is pleasingly shaped, adorably sized, and a perfect blend of form and function.

Add some decoration, and you’ve got a small masterpiece.

Countries such as Ukraine have made an art out of decorating eggs as an Easter tradition.

Eggs “decorated” by God have a beauty all their own. There’s a charm to naturally speckled bird eggs that is irresistible.

You’d like to keep them intact forever, enjoying their freckled surface and gentle colours for as long as possible.

But if the eggs perpetually remained in the same state and were never broken open, you’d miss out on an even greater joy: you’d never get to see the chick emerge.

Sometimes you have to let go of something you love to receive an ever greater blessing.

This is something the disciples had to learn at the first Easter.

Posted on March 13, 2023February 1, 2023 by Lori Cartmell

Message in a Bottle

Have you ever put a message in a bottle and then thrown it into the ocean?

More importantly, has anyone ever come across it years later?

Believe it or not, there are actually people who keep track of this sort of thing.

According to the Message in a Bottle Hunter website, the world’s oldest seagoing message in a bottle is almost 132 years old. It was dropped into the Indian Ocean by a German research vessel studying ocean currents in 1886, and was found on a beach in Western Australia in 2018. (Wikipedia records an even older message, a Japanese one found after 151 years afloat.)

Bottled messages have travelled many thousands of miles. The farthest recorded distance travelled is probably the one that floated from New Zealand to Spain, almost an antipodean journey.

Perhaps the most romantic message in a bottle story concerns Swedish sailor Ake Viking. In 1956, he stuffed the message “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away” into a bottle and cast it into the sea. It was later retrieved by a young woman named Paolina in Sicily. Their subsequent correspondence culminated in marriage in 1958, with the wedding ceremony attracting 4,000 people.

We marvel at events like these: the idea that something thought lost and forgotten can show up decades later.

But there are some things we don’t want to come across again.

Who wants to be reminded of a sordid episode in our past—something that we did that now makes us cringe with regret and horror?

Fortunately, once our sins have been forgiven by God, they won’t wash up on a beach somewhere to accuse us.

Posted on February 6, 2023January 10, 2023 by Lori Cartmell

Thirteen By Any Other Name…Is Still Thirteen

Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer from Pixabay

I recently realized that I wasn’t living in the house that I thought I was.

Last summer I moved into a house bearing the number 15. I love everything about it: the house itself, the neighbours, and the area’s community spirit.

It wasn’t until some months later that I realized that I didn’t actually live at #15: I live at #13. The house next door is #11, and opposite my house is #12. Counting from the bottom of the street, mine is the thirteenth house.

So why didn’t the city call it #13 when it was assigning street numbers to the houses?

In many countries, the number 13 has unlucky connotations. Why? One reason is that there were thirteen present at the Last Supper, including Judas, who would betray Jesus.

Some people are superstitious about this number, and try to avoid its “bad luck” by keeping away from anything labelled 13. There’s even a word for the fear of the number thirteen: triskaidekaphobia.

The result is that many companies and cities fudge their numbering to avoid 13. This is why many hotels and tall buildings seem to lack a thirteenth floor: the elevator buttons skip from floor 12 to 14.

The thirteenth floor continues to exist, as does the thirteenth house on a street: we haven’t erased them. But we just call them by other names. We simply pretend that they’re actually the fourteenth floor or the fifteenth house. Everyone goes along with this fiction because it means we don’t have to face reality. We’re deluding ourselves, of course, but it seems we prefer to live in denial.

We do the same with sin, don’t we?

We call it by other names so we don’t have to face up to the reality of what it really is.

Posted on February 14, 2022February 4, 2022 by Lori Cartmell

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

Did you ever play games with flowers as a child?

Perhaps you squeezed the “mouth” of a snapdragon flower to make it “talk.”

Or maybe you held a buttercup underneath the chin of a friend. If it reflected back a yellow colour, it meant that they liked butter (apparently, everyone does!).

Probably one of the most famous flower games involves the daisy: it’s considered the oracle of affairs of the heart. The daisy supposedly has the ability to tell you if your sweetheart truly loves you or not.

It goes like this: you pluck off each petal of a daisy in turn, and as you do so, alternately say, “He loves me,” or “He loves me not.”

The final petal tells you which statement is true.

You’re left in suspense the whole time, and worry about what the last petal will reveal.

I know this is just a children’s game, but even as adults we sometimes worry if we’re truly loved, don’t we?

Human love can be a fickle thing, and we can often be unsure about the commitment and loyalty of those we love.

That’s why it’s so good to know that with Jesus, we’re never left wondering whether He loves us or not. He never leaves us in suspense as to whether He cares.

He always does.

And He always will.

Posted on January 10, 2022January 5, 2022 by Lori Cartmell

Divine Forgetfulness

Does God have a bit of a memory problem?

It would appear so, according to the Bible.

Several Scriptures tell us that when God forgives our sins, he also forgets them.

Isaiah 43:25 tells us that God blots out our transgressions and remembers our sin no more.

Hebrews 8:12 echoes this: “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.”

But if God’s memory of the sinful things we did is wiped clean, why isn’t ours?

Why didn’t He arrange it so that we can’t remember our shameful deeds, either?

I’m sure many of us would love to have amnesia about our moral failures, but God knows that this isn’t best for us.

I think there are several reasons for this:

Posted on January 3, 2022December 28, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

Create Your Own BC/AD Pivot Point

Image of Anno Domini inscription on Windsor Castle, England, by Leo Reynolds via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s natural to divide your life into “before” and “after,” isn’t it?

We mentally calculate whether something happened before or after certain important events in our lives.

We might say that such-and-such happened before we moved to Boston, or after we got married. We may recall that another thing happened after we had our son but before the twins were born.

Ancient cultures did something similar. Those with monarchies would mark events in relation to what king was on the throne at the time. They’d say that something happened in the 9th year of the reign of King so-and-so.

Certainly, most of us will divide our lives into pre-and post-pandemic eras. March of 2020 was a clear demarcation point between our previous “normal” life and one dominated by COVID-19.

The dividing lines of our lives will be different for all of us, but what most of the world has in common is the use of the same calendar system to mark off years. This system has its own before-and-after pivot point.

For instance, most of us just celebrated the start of AD 2022.

What does the “AD” mean, anyway? Or “BC” for that matter?

Posted on November 25, 2021November 24, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

Want To Feel God’s Love?

It seems like marriage proposals these days are a competitive sport.

It used to be that a man would propose to his beloved over a romantic dinner, with flowers on the table and perhaps some violins playing. He would get down on bended knee, present a ring, and ask for her hand in marriage.

Apparently, that just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Now, proposals have to be over-the-top. They might feature anything from fireworks to skywriting. A will-you-marry-me moment nowadays might involve a scavenger hunt, a fake movie trailer, a full orchestra and choir, or a ride in a hot-air balloon.

More adventurous grooms might enlist a celebrity in the proceedings, hire a flash mob at Times Square, or arrange to appear on the Jumbotron at a sports game.

And then there’s the man whose proposal took an entire year to create. Unbeknownst to his girlfriend Jennifer, each day for 365 days Dean Smith videotaped himself proposing to her, every time with a unique message. On the 366th day, he showed her the completed video and finally proposed in person (she said yes).

Why do people go to so much trouble?

Because they want to show their intended how much they’re loved.

Did you know that God has done the same for you?

He loves you deeply and He wants you to know it!

Let’s see how God stacks up when it comes to showing love.

Posted on October 28, 2021October 27, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

Watch the Impossible Happen

They say that it’s impossible for bumble bees to fly.

The theory goes that their weight and size are too great for their tiny wings to support, so according to the laws of aerodynamics they shouldn’t be able to get off the ground.

The only problem is, no one has told the bumble bees that.

They seem to have no difficulty in buzzing about in the air from flower to flower, collecting pollen and nectar to bring back to the hive.

So how do they do it, when physics would seem to suggest that they can’t?

For a long time, this was a mystery to us. Eventually we discovered that bumble bees actually don’t defy the laws of aviation: they simply fly in a different way than a plane or bird does.

We learned that the propeller-like way they beat their wings creates an invisible force above them, like a mini-tornado or -hurricane. This vortex actually sucks them upward, giving them lift in spite of their weight.

There was more going on than met the eye, which allowed the “impossible” to happen.

Likewise, when we believe in God, there is more going on in our lives than we’re aware of.

When God is working in your life, sometimes He will cause the impossible to happen, even when you can’t see how it could.