there aren’t many nights now where i sleep straight through…for one reason or another, i wake up and either can easily go back to sleep or my mind gets running. and as my mind runs, the ability to return to sleep leaves me…

fortunately, this morning’s wake up was at 5:15 or so. i can handle being up at 5:15. this morning, my mind turned to prayer and an intense desire to read the Scriptures, picking up in Genesis whee i left off last. this is never a bad thing, and the call to prayer should always be answered.

there are times where i wish i could live a monastic schedule. get up early to pray, rising before the sun, going to do a few basic chores before a small breakfast, then more reading and prayer…how to do this with 3 kids is a mystery to me. i love my kiddos, and my wife, she would be fine with the schedule, too. but i just don’t know how kids would react to that lifestyle. it doesn’t leave much room for their needs. oh well…

for now, i look to the geneology of the son’s of noah. chapter 10 is a list of their sons, and their son’s sons, and so on and so forth. now i realize that the lists of names don’t have a lot of bearing for us today. we have absolutely no idea who these guys were. they are just a name in a list to us. but each man lived his life out just as i do today. they had families like i do, they worked and served, just as i do today, but alli know of him is that his father’s name was eber and his son was almodad. other than that…i don’t know the man. if not for this list, they would have lived their life in the historical anonymity that blankets most of our lives.

but each of these men lived and died. but their families helped repopulate the earth, built cities and raised the next generation to serve God, remembering what the consequences of our sin led to so few generations before. they were born, lived and died in the aftermath of sin…a very visible aftermath.

we live today able to see the aftermath of our sin. because of our depravity, God Himself had to come to earth and perform a greater act of purification than the flood could even hope to accomplish. His act of love serve us even today. the gift and sacrifice of Christ, along with His ressurection, provides us today with a more amazing, and at the same time devistating, result of our sins.

the flood purified once. it was cataclysmic in every sense of the word, but it was a on time thing. it’s purification came and went, and man fell again. Jesus’ sacrifice for our sake reaches beyond the imagination, beyond the flood itself. the magnitude of the flood is difficult to comprehend. the gift of love that God gave us in Christ dwarfs it to the realm of the quark and space ribbon.

all praise to God who loves beyond human imagination!