Writings
Jesus left that place and went into the district of Tyre and Sidon, and a Phoenician woman from those parts came to him calling out, “Take pity on me, Lord, Son of David, for my daughter is badly demon-possessed.” Not a word did he answer, and his disciples approached him: “Send her away,” they said, “for she is calling after us.” He replied, “I was not sent, except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Several years ago, I told you about the lady who brought home a wall plaque that read “PRAYER CHANGES THINGS” and hung it in the kitchen. Upon seeing it hours later, her husband took it down. Thinking that location was the problem, she put it back up in another room. Surprised to find it resurrected elsewhere, he took it back down. So she asked him point blank: “Don’t you like prayer?” To which he said: “Sure, I like prayer. But I don’t like change.”
All right, church, listen up. On this, the first Sunday of the new year, I want to make an introduction. His name is Paul. He is 25 years old. And he has never been sick a day in his life. Until now. Suddenly, and with little apparent cause, he has begun experiencing stomach upset, intestinal distress, frequent headaches and low-grade fevers. He sleeps fitfully….when he sleeps.
Sometime during the evening of Thursday, January 20, after the last program of a busy church had ended and the last member of that busy church had left, the church’s pastor….the only pastor the church had ever known….the pastor who had started it from scratch and nurtured it from a handful of visitors to over 800 members….the pastor who, in ten crazy, wonderful and relentlessly-forward-surging years, had led those members from the auditorium of an elementary school to a beautiful facility known as Christ United Methodist Church, Chapel Hill, North Carolina….
