Years ago I watched an action-comedy movie : The Mummy 3: the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I loved the special effects and the scale of the adventure, but at the time, I thought all of it was simply embellishment.

Now as I work with my son through ancient history, we’ve been investigating the life of China’s first emperor, and I’m amazed to discover that the movie did not do the scale of the emperor’s creation justice!

He built a tomb complex larger and more intricate than the pyramids, surrounded it with miles of pits filled with 8,000 life-size Terracotta soldiers, commissioned the great wall to be built for hundreds of miles–all after he had build superior weapons for his army and waged war to conquer and unify the different regions of China.

Earlier this year I sat with a friend as his wife struggled to recover from emergency surgery–her uterus had ruptured during the delivery if their third child. He went from the excitement that their little girl had arrived to facing the possibility of losing his wife and having to raise three young children as a single dad. With a wife who was 7 months into her pregnancy myself, you can say that I was also quite shaken during those events. I learned that God sends unnatural levels of peace to people in those circumstances. In my friend’s case, He also graciously restored his wife to health again. He gave them a great blessing.

Pregnancy is a dangerous affair…but it baffles me how many people expect it to go smoothly. Read the rest of this entry »

Saw this picture, and had to share it. It’s not entirely true, but it reminded me how the news tends to skew our perspective too much…

Steve Jobs died, and his life did contribute a lot to our society. But how should God’s perspective challenge our reception of his death vs. our reception of the deaths of millions who never had a chance to contribute?