Lot’s wife belonged to a family with a great name and trust in God’s promises. She even had angels visit her home! God sent them to personally escort her from His coming wrath to His safety (Gen.19:1-22). Yet, she fell into eternal judgment because she looked back to her life in Sodom. She longed to preserve what she had and became a pillar of salt–a crystalline substance used for preservation (Gen. 19:26). Friends, Jesus is kind to warns us in Luke 17:32-33: “Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
Cornelius’ conversion account can teach us many things about the spread of the gospel to the Gentiles in the first century church. We see in this story that God’s salvation through Christ is for all the families of the earth. God shows no partiality but comes to redeem people from all nations. All this is true. But my focus today is on that small line in verse four. It makes me wonder: what if my service and prayers to God were like a memorial offering rising up as a pleasing aroma before His throne?
My mother and father never married. I spent the first seven years of my life with my aunt, a single mother. I’ll spare you the details of my story and will simply say that I know what it’s like to yearn for a parent. I’ve tasted the bitterness that often hangs around a broken home. I’ve lingered near a weary mother, wishing I could share the load.
I'm excited to write an article for Christ and Pop Culture on the "anomaly" of watching Little House on the Prairie in Southeast Washington DC. A paragraph is below and the full article is HERE. Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading!
I live in Southeast Washington, D.C., where the population is 94% black. Watching Little House in “the hood” is a bit of an anomaly. In fact, with the exception of my husband and three others, I can’t name another black person who would be excited to watch the show. One friend told me that she would watch only if forced. People in our D.C. church laugh when we speak of our love for the program–they assume it’s a joke. Their looks become a mixture of surprise and amusement when we persist in our praise of the series.
At some point, The Cosby Show became more than a sitcom; it morphed into a barometer with which to measure success for blacks. But perhaps that was its intention from the beginning. When network executives Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner first pitched the idea of the sitcom to NBC, Cliff Huxtable was a limousine-driving father with a stay-at-home wife and four school-aged children. But before the pilot was shot, Cosby had painted a striking new mural for producers.
