The great danger facing all of us...is not that we shall make an absolute failure of life, nor that we shall fall into outright viciousness, nor that we shall be terribly unhappy, nor that we shall feel [that] life has no meaning at all – not these things. The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to tender the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God – and be content to have it so – that is the danger. That someday we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with husks and trappings of life and have really missed life itself. For life without God, to one who has known the richness and joy of life with Him, is unthinkable, impossible. That is what one prays one's friends may be spared – satisfaction with a life that falls short of the best, that has in it no tingle or thrill that comes from a friendship with the Father.

Phillips Brooks

CATEGORY	CUISINE	TAG	YIELD
Meats		Beef, Onions	1	Servings

INGREDIENTS

1		Thick; lean ground beef patty per person
1 1/2		Inch thick slice of Idaho potato per person
1 1/2		Inch thick slice of large Vidalia onion per, person
		Butter or margarine
		Salt and pepper

INSTRUCTIONS

On a piece of heavily buttered foil, place beef patty, topped with potato,
topped with onion. Top onion with 2 tablespoons butter or margarine. Salt
and pepper heavily. Twist foil together at top to enclose package. Place
packages in ovenproof dish or on baking sheet. Bake at 350 for about 1 hour
and 20 minutes. Serves 1. Posted by Ethel Snyder <essie49@juno.com> Date
Aug. 8, 1997
Recipe by: Country decorating ideas magazine -- Spring 1990 Posted to
MC-Recipe Digest V1 #723 by essie49@juno.com (Ethel R Snyder) on Aug 05,
1997

A Message from our Provider:

“Religion: a mirage. Jesus: reality”

Jesus Christ demands self-denial, that is, self-negation (Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23), as a necessary condition of discipleship. Self-denial is a summons to submit to the authority of God as Father and of Jesus as Lord and to declare lifelong war on one's instinctive egoism. What is to be negated is not personal self or one's existence as a rational and responsible human being. Jesus does not plan to turn us into zombies, nor does he ask us to volunteer for a robot role. The required denial is of carnal self, the egocentric, self-deifying urge with which we were born and which dominates us so ruinously in our natural state. Jesus links self-denial with cross-bearing. Cross-bearing is far more than enduring this or that hardship. Carrying one's cross in Jesus' day, as we learn from the story of Jesus' own crucifixion, was required of those whom society had condemned, whose rights were forfeit, and who were now being led out to their execution. The cross they carried was the instrument of death. Jesus represents discipleship as a matter of following him, and following him as based on taking up one's cross in self-negation. Carnal self would never consent to cast us in such a role. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was right: Accepting death to everything that carnal self wants to possess is what Christ's summons to self-denial was all about.

J.I. Packer