On the second day of our stay in Rome, we got up super early, ate a hearty breakfast, put on comfortable shoes, and got on the subway headed for Vatican City with a tour book in tow. We were confident we would surely beat the crowd with an early start.  In addition, we were smart enough to plan our visit to this tourist-magnet in October, not in the middle of the busy summer months, so we figured we wouldn’t have to spend a lot of our precious time waiting in lines.  We had even purchased tickets online, and we felt good about ourselves!
But as soon as we arrived at the metro station closest to Vatican City, we realized that a whole lot of other people had the same plan!  As if we were competing in a speed-walking event, the three of us walked as fast as our short legs could carry us to get ahead of the mob of people headed in the same direction. Even with all that advance planning, however, we still ended up waiting in line for the security check and to rent an English audioguide for the Vatican Museums tour. You indeed need a lot of stamina and patience to visit the Vatican City.
They say you haven’t seen Rome unless you have been to the Vatican Museums so we were determined to take the time to explore every gallery.  However, we soon realized that doing this might take a whole week or more! The galleries were filled with so many amazing, breathtaking, magnificent (I need more adjectives to do them justice) works of art - paintings, sculptures, tapestries, etc. - that after a while my mind couldn’t handle any more.  It was definitely a case of too much of a good thing, an awesomeness overload!  But we had no choice but to move slowly with the mob in order to reach the pinnacle, the Sistine Chapel, with its famous painted ceiling depiction of the creation account by Michaelangelo.  Incidentally, the Sistine Chapel is also important in that the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church is elected there.
While I was glad to see the most famous ceiling image, “The Creation of Adam,” I was more impressed with and touched by the huge painting on the wall titled “The Last Judgment,” done by Michaelangelo some 25 years after painting the ceiling.  The older Michaelangelo depicts the second coming of Christ and the ensuing judgment.  With Christ in the center, the damned who are being pulled down to hell to be tortured by demons are to His left while the blessed who rise from their graves to enter heaven are to His right.  In addition, Christ is surrounded by important figures in church history, including many martyrs who suffered particularly painful deaths. One particular image that is still vivid in my mind is that of Saint Bartholomew, holding a knife in one hand and his own skin in his other hand.  He is known to have been martyred by being skinned alive.  What a painful and slow death he must have suffered for the sake of Christ!  As great as that suffering must have been, however, it is still nothing compared to being tortured by demons, as the painter seems to convey.
What really struck me was how many of those tens of thousands of daily tourists will just walk away from that painting, considering it as a depiction of a fairy tale or the artist’s wild imagination.  Many may even be shaken by the disturbing nature of the painting, but within a few minutes of leaving the chapel, will forget about it.  I too would have been one of those passerby tourists had it not been for Jesus Christ who saved me out of millions.  Why me and not them? I may never know, but I am eternally grateful for His amazing grace.  How about you?

From Pastor Sara’s Heart
October 28, 2012

I am a relatively simple guy.  My daily routine is nothing out of the ordinary: wake up, do devotionals, go to work, eat, relax, spend time with friends, watch tv, eat more, sleep and repeat.  Regardless of my simplicity and the ordinary nature of my daily routine, life is certainly not mundane.  When you work with as many different personalities and characters as I do, and with the involvement of a plethora of emotions (my own and others), God tends to use the above to “mix things up.”  Every day, my God takes the simple and the ordinary to reveal to me His intricate and exciting plan for me and the world, which ultimately leads me to Him.  How?  Let me share with you how God has been challenging me to do this.
For my enjoyment, I have been reading “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer.  I highly recommend it.  Here is what Tozer says about God:
“God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may.  In making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality.  He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions.  The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.”
God is near to us.  Not only is He the God of the Old and New Testament times, but He is God of the 21st century and is well, aware of the world we live in today.  If we are able to fathom the mystery that the God of the universe, who spoke life into being, calls Himself Emmanuel, God with us, we begin to understand that God is a person with personality and not only does He ordain and allow things to happen, He cares about the people that things happen to!
Our relationship with God is no different than any other relationship we have with the people around us.  God gently and powerfully invites us to pursue Him.  God in His perfection makes Himself available to us, reaches out to us first, and loves and delights in our pursuit of Him. If that would only be our response to His grace!  Even more, He brings us and uses the different physical places that we find ourselves, different situations and circumstances, and simple routines, that perhaps we would seek Him and know Him more (Acts 13).
“How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers.  Everything is made to center upon the initial act of “accepting” Christ and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.  We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more to seek Him.”
Where are we in our pursuit of God?  Do we recognize that He took that first step through Jesus Christ in reconciling sinners to an amazing, personal relationship with Almighty God?  I pray that God would open our eyes to see how He uses the ordinary to draw us closer to an extraordinary God and that we would be driven to radically pursue our Awesome God.

From Pastor Keeyoung’s Heart
October 21, 2012