Talking Galatians on the sidewalks of southwest Lansing
Because I am meniscus free in my left knee, my doctors says I need to walk faithfully everyday. Otherwise my knee will seize up like a car engine getting way too low on oil.
My walking partner is my wife. She's been unstinting in her support to walk and, as part of it, we talk. On these walks we have talked about everything. On any given day, we talk about our kids, our grandson, about teachers in the classroom, about politicians on all levels, about our pre-born granddaughter, about moving to Florida, about going to Haiti to work on an orphanage, about our volunteer work and about church and our relationship to God and Jesus Christ.
Right now, our conversations center around our church's special effort to have everybody read through the New Testament in eight weeks. The goal is to get whole books of the Bible, rather than pick and poke through individual verses.
Today, we read through Galatians, a letter written by the Apostle Paul to a group of Christians in what is now modern-day Turkey. Some believers of that day said that Gentile believers had to obey old Jewish law to have a relationship with God. Paul said they were wrong.
He also talked believers who were filled with the Holy Spirit and the fruit that came from that. On our walk, we picked apart the "who, what, when, where, how, why and so what" of that.
Tomorrow is the book of Romans. We should have a good conversation. We might have to expand the walk by a couple of miles though.