Will Vaus

When I was young, I had a tiny bit of experience with rock climbing on more than one occasion. And the very first occasion happened in Zermatt, Switzerland, the home of the Matterhorn. I was barely a teenager, and for some reason, my parents thought it would be a good idea to send their not-very-athletic-son out with an experienced mountain climbing guide. I guess my parents thought that I should be challenged to move a bit out of my comfort zone.   Well, this big mountain of a man, with long, black beard, took me out hiking to some location outside of the village of Zermatt, and he taught me the basics of rock climbing. We were scaling little, tiny rocks mind you, not mountains. But at the end of the day, the guide said to me, in his broken English, “You come back next year, and I take you up the Matterhorn. Those rocks are the same as these. There’s just more of them.” Thankfully, we didn’t go back to Zermatt the next summer and I never had to see that scary mountain man again. T...

What do you think of when you hear the word  “imitation”? Perhaps what comes to mind is a cheap substitute for the real thing, as in cooking we have imitation vanilla.   We also think of people who imitate others but in a way that renders them inauthentic because they are not being themselves.   Still, there is a good sense in which imitation can take place. When a child imitates the good traits of a good parent because they love them, look up to them, and want to be like them, that is a good kind of imitation.   Well, imitation is what our text for today is all about from 3 John 9-15. Listen for God’s word to you…    I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will not welcome us.  So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he even refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church. Dear fri...

  World Book Day is, apparently, celebrated on different days in different countries. I read somewhere that WBD in the UK is on March 4 this year. So look what arrived in my mailbox just in time for World Book Day... It is not a first edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . I cannot afford to purchase first editions of The Chronicles of Narnia . But it is an early British edition with the same dustcover as the first edition. And now I have a complete set of early British editions of the Narnia books. I also have a first American edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  that was given to me... I have a facsimile dustcover on it to protect it. But I love the original artwork on the actual cover... The book was given to me by Edna Watson and has her signature on the front free end paper... Edna corresponded with Lewis and sent him care packages in the 1950s. You can see the letters from the Lewis brothers to her in the third volume of The Collected Letters of C....

One of my favorite things on the Internet is Google Earth which is now tied into Google Maps. I love being able to zoom in, via satellite from outer space, on a country, then a particular city, and even further, down to a single street, and finally focus on a single house. I have enjoyed looking at satellite images of places where I have lived, and other places I have visited, during my 57+ years on planet earth.   The three letters of John have this same “zooming in” effect. The First Letter of John, which we finished studying in January, could, in many ways, have been addressed to any church in the first century. Perhaps that is why the Church at large has found, out of the three letters of John, the greatest relevance in this first letter, not only in the first century, but down to the twenty-first century.   However, in his second letter, John is clearly writing to a particular church, “the elect lady”. We don’t know for certain where that particular church was, presumably...