A Couple of Ends Come Together; Also Tieche Sermons Now Available Online

So I tried something the other day. I wrote a sermon around a song.

The song is called "Held" and it's by Natalie Grant. It was written by a woman named Christa Evans who, in the span of two months, saw her two best friends go through unspeakable tragedy. One, who had gone through 3 miscarriages, finally gave birth to a healthy baby boy. One morning, she and her husband woke up to find the baby died of SIDS. Crib death, it's called. Two months later, her other best friend's husband went into the doctor's office because of headaches. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and died in just a few months.

How do you process that? The song is one of the best I've heard in the last 6 months. Check it out.

It just so happened, by sheer coincidence that I began studying a passage in the Bible where John the Baptist asks Jesus if he is going to be released from prison and certain death, or if he's going to die. Jesus responds, cryptically, that John will not get out of prison.

I tied the two together, throwing in a clip from the movie "Signs" where Mel Gibson's character Graham Hess - who lost his wife in a traffic accident - tells his family that he is not wasting one more minute of his life on prayer, because clearly God does not hear or care or answer.

We're also trying to podcast the whole message for folks. I'd like to thank my brilliant IT guy, Steve "Duct Tape" Ferrero, who at 19, is one of the sharpest guys I've ever met in my life. If you'd like, you can download the message here.