Will Vaus

I don’t know anyone who likes to visit the doctor, let alone, visit a surgeon, much less, go through surgery. I have had only one surgical procedure performed on me during my lifetime thus far, and that was to remove my tonsils and adenoids when I was nine years old. I didn’t like anything about it. To this day my memory can almost conjure up the smell and taste of the gas they used to knock me out in the operating room. Even more, I remember waking up in the recovery room with the worst sore throat I have ever had and being told I could only quench my gnawing thirst with ice chips. Then I had to spend a sleepless night in the hospital in a room filled with other children. Well, you get my drift. And if you have ever had any kind of surgery, you can relate. My whole experience in the hospital was horrible! But the results were wonderful. I went from being a sickly child with asthma and numerous allergies to a healthy boy who enjoyed food and the outdoors much more than he ever...

Have you ever wanted your life to be better? Maybe you have wanted a better job, or a better place to live, or better health, or better children, or a better spouse, or a better church. Or how about a better you? The New Testament letter to the Hebrews has been called “The Book of Better Things”. That’s because the two Greek words for “better” and “superior” appear some 15 times in this letter.  Now, the New Testament does not promise that our life in this world,  as we measure it , will get better if we follow Jesus. But the New Testament does promise that if we follow Jesus we will discover life in all of its fullness, life everlasting. And what could be better than that? We do not know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews. The author is not named. Some have thought that Paul wrote it. But that is unlikely. The style of writing is unlike Paul, and in all the other Pauline letters of the New Testament, Paul names himself as the author. Other scholars have spec...

In my lifetime, I have never known another moment in history when we as Americans are as politically polarized as we are now. And the polarization going on in Washington seems to be seeping into the life-blood of every American. Compare this to what politics and the mood of Americans was like 30 years ago, and you can see the dramatic difference. As all of this change in the mood of our country has unfolded, despair has turned into a souring, growing anger in many people, including many of us as Christians. We’re angry about values, politics, the media, and so much more. This anger has generated more heat than light. It has given rise to a warrior instinct, where Republicans refer to Democrats as the enemy, and vice versa. As a nation we are shouting more at each other, from the extremes of the political spectrum, and we are hearing very little from moderates, perhaps because they don’t want to stand up in the middle and get shot at from both sides. How is the Church supposed to ...