It wasn’t until I was in high school that I began to notice my mom would often repeat a proverbial phrase in response to my anxious musings about the future. “Bloom where you’re planted,” she would quip as I worried openly about what I should do with my life. I wasn’t a Christian at the time, and I was right in the thick of my teenage years, so these sayings—she had a host of others—would, to borrow another idiom, “float in one ear and out the other.” What hath horticulture to do with a young man’s concern over the future?
When I trusted Christ during my sophomore year of college, my passion for the Scripture turned insatiable. I desired to know the truth and talk about it with others. My parents were already Christians, so it was natural that our conversations would often turn to the Bible. It was sometime after my conversion that I was talking with my parents, probably pondering over concerns about the future, when my mom again unearthed her agricultural wisdom: “Bloom where you’re planted.” But this time she added, “Where is that in the Bible?”
Continue reading “Is That in the Bible? | “Bloom Where You’re Planted””
Five hundred years ago this October 31st, a young Augustinian monk, disturbed about the Roman Catholic Church’s many pastoral abuses and doctrinal aberrations, nailed to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, a list of topics he wanted to debate with the local religious authorities. Although he didn’t realize it at the time, Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” would serve as the catalyst for a theological and ecclesiastical upheaval within Europe that would transform churches and whole communities around the world. By returning to the Scriptures as the fount of divine knowledge and rediscovering the doctrine of justification by faith, Martin Luther and those who followed in his footsteps opened a gateway of truth and life to those who had long walked in error and death. 
