Dr. Harold McNabb

When  I graduated from the Baptist Leadership Training School in Calgary, 1967, before University and theological college,  the school yearbook had some caption about us under our photographs. Somebody wrote about me "Harold always has a quote from James S. Stewart for every occasion."
James S. Stewart was a famous Church of Scotland preacher in the early 1900's. I found him an engaging writer and still do. I very much admire him, though I rarely quote from him anymore. Today will be an exception.

In his book on the life of Jesus¹, Stewart comments briefly on Jesus life up to the time of his baptism.
Stewart's take on the silence of Jesus' first thirty or so years of life was that he lived a normal life of learning and growing the same as any young boy. We see occasional glimpses of his life; his birth, Jesus at the temple, but apart from that, all we know is that he "grew in stature and in favor with God and man." And that's about it. Everything else is speculative until His baptism when he steps center stage into the life of the world.

And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
?Get up,? he said, 'take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt.
Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.?
 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt,  Matthew  2:12-14

Just this past week in the news was the report of a man named "Chemical Ali". Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin, was one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen and got the name from his fondness at using chemical weapons, especially against the Kurds of northern Iraq. During Saddam's time thousands were gassed by this man. He threatened to bury the Kurds by bulldozers loads¹. 
Saddam himself was totally ruthless and used  assassination and mass murder to keep his iron grip over his country.

A few days ago I was listening to an NPR radio station from Seattle. An artist named Bo Bartlett¹ was being interviewed about an exhibit of his works currently in Seattle. He was describing the feature painting named "Heartland". It is a painting of a boy pulling a wagon filled with sticks. As he spoke about the painting he said that part of the inspiration came from his own childhood. When his mother would discipline him, she would make him go and cut the stick, or the "switch" which she would then use to spank him. He said that he had wondered to himself..."what if I had kept all those sticks over the years?"