Toothpicks and an oven door

Our oven door has a habit of falling off. And the thing is, is it falls off when you try to open it. Which is normally when you want/need to get something in or out.

Normally it's just a matter of tightening the screws when you feel the handle reach a certain "jiggly" threshold and you are good for a few more weeks. But today the handle popped off, and there was no tightening it back up! Apparently we'd stripped the threading.

So after a scramble to see if we could locate someplace local that might have a replacement handle, I decided to consult the wisdom of Lowes.

10 minutes later I'm breaking off bits of toothpick into the handle holes, screwing the bolts back in, and voila: we have an oven handle again! It's not often that the fix you get from a retailer involves buying nothing from them and the use of a couple toothpicks, but when it happens it ensures a future repeat customer!

Can God ______?

The first time I remember this question, and seriously thought about it, was in the form of, "Can God create a mountain too large for God to move?" It's a self-contradicting statement when concerning and all-powerful God, and is designed to "trip up" the believer and, I suppose, suggest the idea of an all-powerful entity is incoherent. And the correct answer, I believe, is that, yes, in theory He could, but He would not because He is a God that makes sense, so it is not an issue about what the outcome would mean.
But a more interesting question, I think, is this, "Can God lie?" This was a question we discussed at a recent small group meeting. And the automatic answer for most Christians I think is, "No." And this is technically true I think, and scripture supports the notion. But, I think the real interesting part is the source of this limitation. Typically the response will be that it is due to His nature: God is pure "good", therefore cannot lie (which is a sin after all).

But my thought on this is that then becomes some external limitation, thus God is suddenly NOT all powerful because there is something He cannot do! And certainly Satan does not have some power that God does not. Jesus said, "You are of your father the Devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and has not stood in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of liars." (John 8:44) So certainly Satan has the power to lie, and he does so of his own accord ("from his own nature"), not caused by God to do so. So we are left with either Satan has some ability that God does not, or God has the ability to lie.

So my thought, and I don't know if scripture suggests the source of why God "cannot" lie, is that this is a self-imposed restriction placed upon Himself by Himself. In other words, God cannot lie because He has decided He won't.

I would further argue that due to God's role of being the definition of perfection and truth, even if He did lie, His lie, from our perspective, would become truth, from our perspective. In other words, if God were to say the color red is actually the color blue, because He is the manifestation perfection and truth it would be so for us! I certainly do not think that is the case, there is nothing in scripture to suggest God plays this sort of "tricks", in fact quite the opposite: "For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. [...]" (1Cor 14:33) Nevertheless, I think it is an interesting thought.

Philippians 1:12-20 - When we are stopped, God keeps moving

Sometimes we are stopped in our tracks in this world. Despite all our prayers, the clear signs, the impressions leading us down a clear path, we hit a wall, stopped dead in our tracks. That must have been the scenario Paul is describing in Philippians: his imprisonment.
But reading verses 12-20 we get a very different picture than what I often seem to experience. Paul writes about how his imprisonment has done the exact opposite of what we would expect: spread the gospel message! "Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has actually resulted in the advance of the gospel" (Phil 1:12) How amazing it is to see God work through situations when it seems we are at a standstill. Not even imprisonment can stop God and His purposes, our God is greater!
It is reassuring to know that we, our limitations, and obstacles in our way, are not enough to stop God. Just like Paul, all we must do is trust in our Lord and allow Him to do His work through us and our situations!

Truth: It's good to be Objective

It seems objective truth is a necessity. Without it, in a relativistic world, things seem to become nonsensical. For example, person A can hold a truth that states lying is good, while person B could hold a truth that is the exact opposite: namely that lying is bad.

This gets even more nonsensical as individually held truths are applied to external entities. For example, person A could hold a truth that says all other people that lie are good, which seems to be contradictory to person B's truth. Even more nonsensical: person A's truth says that all people consider lying to be good. How does that possibly work with person B's truth? Or ultimately, if person A holds a truth that objective truth is itself true, and person B holds the opposite, obviously one must be wrong.

Therefore the idea that there is some objective truth seems the only logical choice and is necessary. The rub comes with determining the source of such truth.