They couldn’t believe their eyes.  The altar had been torn down! The altar, the very core of their spiritual life and spiritual heritage and now it was just rubble.  They had never actually seen the Temple or the altar it housed themselves, but they had heard the stories and their parents and grandparents delighted in…

She was a successful business woman,  actually she was a successful business owner and that was virtually unheard of in the time and society she lived in. Remember this was 2000 years ago in a culture that was slightly male centered; actually it was very male centered. Females weren’t exactly chattel but they weren’t exactly…

Leaving Childish things 2 Rev. Denn Guptill His name was Mickey Cohen.  And he was a crook.  And not just a little crook either, Mickey Cohen was the top man in the Los Angeles underworld during the forties and fifties.  He had his finger into everything: gambling, extortion and prostitution.  At his word heads were…

If I were to mention 1 Corinthians 13 to most of you, it would be recognized as the “Love Chapter”  and that is true.  The main part of the chapter is about love and we hear it preached on and read at weddings, in particular the section between  1 Corinthians 13:4-7 Love is patient and…

Miracle on 34th Street The Miracles of Christmas If nothing else I am expanding my movie repertoire, I hadn’t seen any of these movies prior to starting this series. I had seen bits and pieces but never the entire movie.    Miracle on 34th Street begins at the Macy Thanksgiving day parade when an Older bearded…

It’s a Wonderful Life (Begin with Clip from “It’s a Wonderful Life” scene where George meets Clarence and wishes he had never been born” It’s a Wonderful Life has consistently been ranked in the top 100 movies of all times, it has been called the number one inspirational film as well as one of the…

Bah, Humbug,  Scrooge is like Bond, everyone has a favorite.  For some there is no Scrooge like Alistair Sim, he was the actor who portrayed Scrooge in the clip we just saw. He also reprised the role in an Oscar winning short film in 1970.  Maybe it is Albert Finney in the 1970 film simply…

That time of the year is coming again, you know when we can sit around our television sets and watch people’s hopes, dreams and aspirations crushed and ground into the dust.  It was advertising guru Roy Williams who wrote “Every dream of the future is a seed. But until your dream falls into the ground…

He just kept right on smiling. It didn’t matter what they did or what they said he just kept right on smiling. They were American army officers and he was their Korean house boy, and for whatever reason they gave him a hard time about everything, he wasn’t fast enough, he wasn’t polite enough, he…

The year was 1863 and the US Civil War was in its second year.   Historians tell us that at that point if you were keeping score the Confederate Army was ahead. The War had shifted its focus from the Southern States and General Robert E Lee was embarking on his second Invasion of the North…