Remember the Cost

I just read a couple of things I want to share with you.  If you're like me, there are times when you find your relationship with the Lord so "normal" or "right" that you tend to forget the cost until an event, a song, or in this case something you read, jars your whole being.  We should never be so at rest in our walk that we forget for one moment what it cost.

From Desiring God:

I was studying Psalm 43 with a friend in Urdu the other day. We came to where it says in English, "I will go to the altar of God."

As I read along in Urdu, I did not know the word for "altar," so I asked my friend what it was. He didn't know how to translate the word into English, but he gave the following English description: "It is God's bloody place, where the throats of the animals are slit for sacrifice."

Of course. It's an altar.

Sometimes I think of an altar as the carpeted stairs and dais at the front of the church meetinghouse. But it's not. It is a bloody place—a place of sacrifice and death.

I need to remember that.

And from UPI:

Couple back in Canada after Kenya attack

 

A Canadian couple who were attacked and almost killed in Kenya, where they were working as missionaries, are back at home.

John and Eloise Bergen, both still in wheelchairs because of their injuries, arrived at the airport in Calgary late Monday, the Calgary Herald reported.

A group of 15 relatives, all wearing T-shirts carrying the word "Believe," met them at the airport.

Six men have been charged with the assault in Kenya, including two who worked for the Bergens as security guards, Camwest News Service reported. Authorities say that Eloise Bergen, 66, was gang-raped, while her husband, 70, was dumped in the bushes and left for dead.

The couple were working for Hope for the Nations, a Canadian medical charity. They plan to return to Kenya once they have recuperated.

"They're just very tired with the whole ordeal but they definitely want to come back. There's no doubt about them coming back," Steve Pippin of Hope for the Nations told Camwest in an interview from Kenya..

Copyright 2008 by United Press International.