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Katie arrived in Paris yesterday. She has a week and a half to find a place to live while she attends graduate school. Please pray that she will find a wonderful flat, relatively inexpensive, near her school.
We talked about this experience she had while hiking and I asked her to write something about it for the blip.

My dad and I were hiking in the Colorado foothills the other day. As we were ambling along, I was surprised to see indiscriminate pine trees that were dying. I could not figure out the cause, but as I thought this out loud, my dad explained why.

bq. The trees have died because of a pine beetle that has succeeded in eating away enough of the tree to ultimately kill it. This beetle is unhindered because of the lack of tree sap produced. Under normal circumstances, the sap either surrounds the beetle and kills it, or expels the beetle from the tree. There is not enough sap because there has been a lack of rainwater. So the direct cause of death is this beetle, yet it is only allowed to wreck havoc because of a lack of water. In order to save the tree, one must either go around picking out all the beetles, or pray for the rain that will then simply take care of the beetle problem.

I thought of our world we live in, with its many “beetles” or problems that are destructive to the life that is intended for us by a loving God. As Christians, what do we do with these problems we face? For example, what do we do with the problem of abortion? Do we pluck out the abortion doctors or close down the clinics to solve this problem? Or do we let the “rain” of Christ’s love and truth fall? Will the problems then take care of themselves? What about pornography? If we shut down web sites and shops that produce porn, do this ultimately solve the problem? It may be a good step, but I think if we “rain” the truth of how God sees our bodies and how He fearfully and wonderfully made us, this may cause some of the beetles to simply disappear before they even get to the tree.

Katie leaves us with great questions. How is the church to proclaim hope in Christ to a world seeking death? (Matt. 5:13-16)