There is something very special about someone visiting your home and sharing a meal with you. During the global pandemic, we knew what it was to miss out on visiting others in their homes—and on having them visit us for special occasions like Thanksgiving or birthdays. 

In 1897, Adolph S. Ochs, the owner of the New York Times, adopted for his paper the motto, “All the news that’s fit to print”. It was a declaration of his intention to maintain high standards of journalism, as well as to hold to good taste and integrity in the advertising he would permit in the paper. 

The Library of Parliament in Canada is the only part of the building that survived the great fire of 1916—and that dates back to the Victorian Era. The library is a very striking room—a great open rotunda with galleries spanning the circumference. Rising in the centre of the library, in the place of absolute preeminence, is a towering statue of Queen Victoria. The point is that the Queen is at the centre of everything in Victorian Canada. The institution of government—the Dominion itself—is grounded in her rule and exists at her good pleasure. The symbolism is powerful and inescapable. 

It is not too difficult to affirm the goodness of God when all is going well—when you gaze into the eyes of your future spouse or when you sit by a lake on a glorious summer day. But it is a bit more difficult to extol the goodness of God during the storms of life—when your spouse betrays you, when your boss fires you, or when your doctor calls with life-altering medical news. Charles Spurgeon once wrote that “God is too good to be unkind and He is too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace His hand, we must trust His heart.” But how do we trust God with the pain in our lives? Can we trust God when others have let us down and even betrayed us?

In Hebrews 12, we are given a vivid picture of the Christian life. The writer takes us to a great stadium with a long race track, and he invites us to imagine ourselves as runners on the track, enduring a long and grueling race.