Insight for Today
A Daily Devotional by Pastor Chuck Swindoll

Leonard Held was a paragon of respectability. He was a middle-aged, hard-working lab technician who had worked at the same Pennsylvania paper mill for nineteen years. . . . He was admired as a model in his community.

The longer I live the less I know for sure. That sounds like 50% heresy . . . but it's 100% honesty. In my younger years I had a lot more answers than I do now. Things were absolutely black and white, right or wrong, yes or no.

"Self-praise," says an ancient adage, "smells bad." In other words, it stinks up the works. Regardless of how we prepare it, garnish it with little extras, slice and serve it up on our finest silver piece, the odor remains.

Somebody copied the following paraphrase from a well-worn carbon in the billfold of a thirty-year veteran missionary. With her husband, she was on her way to another tour of duty at Khartoum, Sudan. No one seems to know who authored it.

My high school graduating class had its thirtieth anniversary reunion a number of summers ago. I'm sure they had a ball. A blast would better describe it, knowing that crowd.

Eight words were brashly smeared across the dashboard of the speedboat tied up at Gulf Shores, Alabama. They reflected the flash and flair of its owner whose fast life was often publicized in sporting news across America.

I cannot imagine anything more boring and less desirable than being poured into the mold of predictability as I grow older. Few things interest me less than the routine, the norm, the expected, the status quo.

Your mind is a muscle. It needs to be stretched to stay sharp. It needs to be prodded and pushed to perform. Let it get idle and lazy on you, and that muscle will become a pitiful mass of flab in an incredibly brief period of time.

If I may select a well-known phrase from the cobwebs of the fourteenth century and wipe away the dust to garner your attention, it is: "COMPARISONS ARE ODIOUS." Odious . . . disgusting, detestable.

Hosea started a scandal in the parsonage. Why? Hold onto your hat—he married a prostitute. Talk about gossip! His name became a byword for "fool." Respect for him dropped to zero. His reputation was suddenly null and void.

The bitter news of Dawson Trotman's drowning swept like cold wind across Schroon Lake to the shoreline. Eyewitnesses tell of the profound anxiety, the tears, the helpless disbelief in the faces of those who now looked out across the deep blue water.

It is quite probable that someone reading my words this moment is fighting an inner battle with a ghost from the past. The skeleton in one of yesterday's closets is beginning to rattle louder and louder.

Snake River Canyon coiled up, rattled its tail, and sank its fangs into its would-be captor. On a sultry Sunday afternoon its l,700-foot jaws yawned wide as it swallowed a strange-tasting capsule prescribed for it.

Perhaps you've uttered the American's Prayer at some anxious moment recently: "Lord, give me patience . . . and I want it right now!" This rare and remarkable virtue is within the and-so-forth section in Galatians chapter 5.

Are you ready for a surprise? You blink twenty-five times every minute. Each blink takes you about one-fifth of a second. Therefore, if you take a ten-hour automobile trip, . . . you will drive twenty miles with your eyes closed.

The feelings are familiar. Mouth open. Eyes like saucers. Chill up the spine. Heart pounding in the throat. Momentary disbelief. We frown and attempt to piece the story together without a script or narrator.

Greece said . . . Be wise, know yourself. Rome said . . . Be strong, discipline yourself. Judaism says . . . Be holy, conform yourself. Epicureanism says . . . Be sensuous, enjoy yourself.

AS WE MOVE TOWARD the close of this year, we must refocus our priorities. Here is an anchor passage for us as we end one year and begin another.

March 11, 1942, was a dark, desperate day at Corregidor. The Pacific theater of war was threatening and bleak. One island after another had been buffeted into submission. The enemy was now marching into the Philippines.

My first rude awakening to the reality of hunger occurred early in 1958 when our troop ship full of U.S. Marines pulled into the harbor of Yokohama, Japan. We were so thrilled to see land, having been at sea for seventeen days.