Left behind as a good thing.

37As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

The flood "took ... away" unsuspecting unbelievers.  At the end, when Jesus returns to cut short the tribulation afflicting His own, few will see it coming.  Like a tsunami, the wave of glory will wipe out those not anchored in faith and connection to Jesus.  Those left standing, those "left behind", will be looking up in newfound peace and rapturous wonder.

The message:  hang on, love until He pulls you up or clears all the debris around you.  

King James appreciation

I like the King James version because the guys prepping it did not mind leaving it a bit "raw" and with a lack of elegance when all the pieces didn't naturally fall into place.  Like having pieces of a jigsaw puzzle where the punch blade was a bit dull, so some pieces had little extra stuff attached.  It feels like KJ boys held an underlying assumption that they were not up to the challenge of knowing all the time exactly how to trim those pieces.  So they settled for leaving the extra on, trusting God would take it from there.

That's helpful for me, because it keeps some clues stuck on passages I would otherwise be even more clueless about.

Prayer Book Service at Home

Grabbed the Book of Common Prayer off the shelf today to do a little "church at home."  Despite being the 1979, the girls and I went through Morning Prayer (Rite One).  This exercise needs a lot of modifications when you've got kids who can't read.  But still, I could see the potential of having a few families meeting at a home and doing this regularly.  As a sermon, we just read Matthew 1.