This is coming from someone who really can’t dance. My parents also didn’t let me listen to secular music growing up either.

So I led a Boston Harbor cruise event for my young adult ministry (mostly single adults). Here’s the thing that will annoy some of the more conservative posters here. We had dancing on the boat. And we danced to secular music.

Some of you will think I’m flaunting my “Christian freedom”. I’m not. Here’s the point of the story.

We were walking back to our cars later that night and we accidently ran into a friend in a life threatening situation. I won’t go into details, but this friend had not been on the cruise and we hadn’t seen her in a long time. She had sort of fallen off the deep end. God literally opened up a door for us to help her out and minister to her.

It raised questions in my mind. What if we hadn’t gone to the boat cruise, who would have helped her? What would have happened to our friend? Why hadn’t the friends she had come with helped her?

Our first thought was how much this was God’s timing. Boston has a population of 600,000, what were the chances of us meeting our friend? He put the right people there too, because we were able to address the situation in an appropriate and God pleasing manner.

I don’t think God wants us counting all the rules we keep. We can get like the rich young ruler, telling Jesus “all these I have kept.” (Matthew 20:18-21). However, like Hosea 6:6 says, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.”

Here is a post by Gary Lamb. It is 500 words long. Here is a response to 12 out of those 500 words. It is 675 words long.

How do you manage to write 175 words more than an entire piece over just 2.5% of it? I would say that’s gotta be some kind of a record but it seems like that’s the standard operating procedure of ODMs in general.