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Waiting for a connecting flight in Dallas, I met an old friend headed to the opposite coast. As we sat and visited he showed me a popular book he was reading about the second coming of Christ. Obviously fascinated by the book, he asked me what I was reading about the rapture and had I preached on that subject lately.

Over the years, whether I was doing research for a sermon, preparing to teach a class or trying to understand a person's expectations for our church, various ideas about the purpose or reasons for involvement in church surfaced. People voiced a need to be wanted, a church that provided sound doctrine in its teaching and preaching, a place to escape the noise and pressures of the world, a safe place for children, excitement in the music and sermons and a place where we will be with people like us. The list is longer, but you get the idea.

I ran into a friend recently and as our families were catching up with each other, she asked a question I hear more and more often: Do you have any way to transfer my old videotapes to something else?

Suffering and submission are not popular ideas. Control, winning, success, power: these are the ideas driving our culture. Unlike the Roman Empire in Peter's day, we have the privilege of expressing ourselves through voting and freedom of speech. Even so, our challenge is to face rhetoric that contradicts the word of God, coming from people who claim to believe in God!

A common dictionary description of “power” is the capacity to act or ability to accomplish a purpose. This morning I listened to news commentators discussing political power in Washington D.C. and the various elected officials trying to control a national agenda without success. You might say it was a tale of power without accomplishment.

I remember baptisms from my earliest days in ministry, one at a lake in a beautiful park, others in a stock pond with red mud up to my knees, as we sang “Shall we gather at the river where bright angel feet have trod?” The waters of baptism offer a memorable image of a new beginning to life.

King David wrote about the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23) and he knew his subject. David knew great victories as well as the calamities resulting from his own ego and selfishness, but he also knew the restoration God's grace can bring to us in the darkness. Israel has come to the darkest night of the soul, when every day is more disastrous than the previous and it seems they are no more than a valley of dry bones.

In this month's 55+ Adults column, Frank Fain answers commonly-asked questions about Social Security.

How bad must a situation become before a person will face the truth and change their attitudes and actions?

What happens to a people, who have received God's promises and blessings, and then walked away from God as though he is just one of many choices for meaning and happiness?