Youth Ministry Initiative

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Year of Publication

2003

From Harold Masback, Called, Blessed, and Sent" (June 1, 2003) at pages 7-8:

Dr. Ian Zlotolow was a high powered specialist and division chief at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, a position he found prestigious but draining – he had lost contact with his friends and developed a heart ailment. While serving on a mission trip to Sierra Leone, Dr. Zlotolow came across Lansana Lapia, an 8 year old war orphan scheduled to have his right leg amputated. Suddenly, the doctor felt grasped by a strong connection to the orphan and a compulsion to help. He heard his voice volunteering to take the boy to New York where surgeons would be able to save the leg. Today, nine operations later, Lansana is close to walking. He speaks unaccented English and scoots around Washington Square Park on a skateboard, challenging the regulars to speed chess. Dr. Zlotolow has legally adopted him and is transferring to a slower paced, lower paying job at Stanford University Medical Center and stepping up his work with an international society for rehabilitative surgery. But here’s the really important part, the part that tips off God’s silent hand right in the middle of the story: Dr. Zlotolow says that his colleagues think he is crazy for giving up the prestige and salary of his current position, but “There are no accidents in life… the kid saved my life, meeting him was a wake-up call. I feel like the luckiest man alive right now.” Exactly.

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From Unknown:

As a wise man once said, He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

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2003

From Harold Masback, The Psalmist's Greatest Lesson" (September 7, 2003) at page 7:

Or if you wish an example even closer to home, consider the experience of our parishioner, neighbor and sister, Sherill Smith. Sherill had three beautiful children, a loving husband, a lovely home. She was leading the New Canaan good life in every way. In every way except for the discovery of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Uncertain in her faith, she reached out to Ginger Malachuk and Marjie Calvert and Cindy Kunkel who prayed with her and cared for her and read scripture with her. Even as Sherill’s health failed, her faith grew, until death became inevitable and she invited Ginger over a week before the end. Sherill patted a spot on her bed, asking Ginger to sit with her and proceeded to fly through Scripture passages with joy beaming in her eyes. Finally she turned to Ginger and said, “Ginger, with these I have everything I need. Everything need.”

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1988

From Today in the World (1988) at page 18:

It’s a bad world, an incredibly bad world. But I have discovered in the midst of it a quiet and holy people who have learned a great secret. They have found a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasure in our sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They are masters of their souls. They have overcome the world. These people are the Christians, and I am one of them.”

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From Harold Masback, Nicomachean Ethics":

Nicomachean Ethics, at 1.7.8 Aristotle observed observed that happiness is the one ultimate good desired by all humanity. There are other worthy attributes we seek, like health, integrity, success, and love. But even as these are worthy goals in and of themselves, behind them always lies our hope that they will, in turn, lead to happiness. Happiness, wrote Aristotle, is the one ultimate goal we seek only for itself.

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2003

From Harold Masback, Forgiven not Condemned: He Restoreth My Soul" (September 21, 2003) at pages 7-8:

In 1725 John Newton’s life began with a blessing. His mother, a faithful Christian, tutored him in her faith; his father, a commander and captain of an English merchant ship took his young son to sea with him as a favored cadet. But shortly after his father’s retirement, the boy was captured by a press gang and forced into the Royal Navy. Bad behavior led to stern punishment, desertion led to recapture, and a desperate and dark young Newton talked his Captain into dismissing him onto a Sierra Leone slave ship. By his own description, Newton’s life and habits spiraled steadily downward. A drunk and a libertine, rapes and brawls became routine. What he remembered of his mother’s faith he used to browbeat and lampoon the faith of those around him. Newton’s heart became as hard as the slave owners he served, and he eventually rose to a position of slave ship captain. One night while sailing home with his human cargo, Newton and his ship were overtaken by a howling gale. Convinced the ship could not survive the battering waves, Newton now saw with utter clarity the wreck he had made of his own life. He had squandered his mother’s faith and his father’s advantage and would die a despised failure responsible for untold suffering. Devastated and crushed to his knees, Newton cried out in the storm, “Lord have mercy upon us.” And as the winds died down and the sea settled, he experienced an acceptance, an utter forgiveness, an offered restoration, he knew were undeserved and had presumed to be impossible. For the rest of the journey Newton followed his daily duties by reading his mother’s Bible and praying in his cabin. For the rest of his life he gratefully observed the anniversary of May 10, 1748 as the day of his restoration and conversion. Over the next two years, Newton gave up the slave trade, married his childhood sweetheart, threw himself into Bible study, prayer and worship, and wrote accounts of the mistreatment of slaves. Called into a 44-year ministry, he preached grace with the conviction of one restored, taught and lobbied against slavery, and wrote scores of hymns, including our most beloved hymn describing his personal restoration. His testimony and sermons inspired William Wilberforce who would lead the abolitionist movement in England.
200 years later the descendents of slaves would sing his hymn while marching for civil rights.

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From Saint Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Grace, Question 109, Art. 6:

As Thomas Aquinas wrote, God’s grace is an unbroken ray of light that floods our lives and illuminates our paths at all times. We need only turn back toward God so that our eyes may see.

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2003

From Harold Masback, Courageous Joy" (October 5, 2003) at page 7:

As has been written, “If you knew who walks beside you, fear would be impossible.”

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From Rudyard Kipling:

And the dilemma was captured one day some years back when Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If” was required school reading. Remember “If”? “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…” Like many of you, I had a copy hanging on my wall as a child. And so it was that a minister was exhorting a group of skid row alcoholics at a Bowery soup kitchen. Urging his bedraggled audience to lift themselves to better living, he recited the whole of Kipling’s “If,” his voice rising with passion as he rounded into the final stanze, “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run. ” And just then, in the silence as he drew for breath, a voice from the back row called out, “What if you can’t?” What if you can’t?

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2001

From Harold Masback: God with Us!" (December 23, 2001) at page 6:

The dilemma was captured one day when theologian Paul Tillich was giving a particularly strenuous lecture and a student stood up to ask a question. He said, “Professor Tillich, I think I understand that faith is our ultimate concern. That’s really interesting. But what I really want to know is do you think the ultimate is concerned with me?”

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