Early mornings are very predictable for lots and lots of Christians. Roll out of bed, turn on the coffee pot, pour a cup, settle into a favorite chair and enjoy what is called “the daily devotional.” This usually consists of reading a passage from the Bible and a selection from a daily readings book. It concludes with prayer.

Believers who follow this pattern can go through a good number of devotional readings as the years go by. So they are always looking for new material—something to go along with their Bible and their coffee.

Hoping that I could be helpful in supplying the need for more of these kinds of readings, I gathered up some articles I had written and put them in a book—A Dog and a Clock. The idea was to supply brothers and sisters in Christ with enough devotions to carry them through one month. That quickly led to another book—The Thumbs Up Man—to carry “devotion-doers” through another month—and so on.

You can guess what happened after three or four books came out. There are twelve months in the year. So why not provide enough books to cover a year? Well, off we went and out the books came until there were finally twelve! Since these books were designed to go with the Bible and a good cup of coffee, it seemed right to call them My Coffee-Cup Meditations. Here are all twelve books in one big volume—372 readings in total!

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I’ve seen gold, and I’ve seen silver, but I have never seen apples of gold in silver settings. My initial reaction is that such apples in such settings must reflect both tremendous value and exquisite beauty. There are words like that—words of tremendous value and exquisite beauty! And we can possess them even though they were all spoken so very long ago. We can possess them by reading the reports of them in the Bible and by reflecting deeply on what we have read.

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It was finally gone, the victim of the cold steel of a bulldozer’s blade. I knew the end was rapidly approaching, but I still hated to see it go. I’m talking about the little old house in which I spent the first twenty-one years of my life. Little? Yes. It consisted of a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, a pantry and a porch. Oh, yes, there was also that little area on one side that my mother referred to as “the sun room.”

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Jesus identifies Himself as the key to the Bible. I think of Him as the golden key because we associate gold with enormous value, and there’s nothing more valuable than the Bible’s presentation of Jesus. There is no greater knowledge to be had than the knowledge of Christ. There are no greater riches to be possessed than the riches of Christ. The Bible will be to us as a heavy steel door if we don’t insert into its lock the golden key.

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After we sang our closing song and prayed our closing prayer, these wonderful people began coming to me one after the other to bid farewell. I couldn’t speak their language, and they couldn’t speak mine, but I soon discovered we didn’t need an interpreter as we had a common language after all. It was the language of smiles, tears and uplifted index fingers. Yes, as they said their goodbyes to me, these Brazilian brothers and sisters in Christ would point upward. That was each one’s way of saying: “I will meet you in the air.”

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I don’t know how my dog Molly knows, but she knows. She knows when Sunday arrives. I’ve tried to figure out how she knows, and I keep coming up empty. But from the very time she gets up on Sunday, she seems to act differently than on other days. Early on Sunday mornings, I place my Bible on the small table by the garage door. But Molly always senses its Sunday before I do that. I wonder what her clue is. Do we know as much as Molly? Do we know that Sunday is special? Do we love Sundays?

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I used to marvel at Rover. Milking time would come, and Dad would say: “Rover, get the cows!” But Rover wouldn’t immediately dash off as one might expect. He would listen until he heard the bell that Dad had put around the neck of one of the cows. Then he would dash off, find the cows and slowly herd them home. It was obvious that he relished doing his job. It was something that made him feel proud.

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We had to spend quite a bit time in the barn on the little family farm that I called home during my childhood years. The cows had to be milked each morning and evening. That barn was already old and rickety when my dad bought the farm. In wintertime the wind would whistle through the cracks in those barn walls and chill us to the bone. My dad’s remedy for the problem was to nail cardboard over those cracks. That certainly didn’t make the barn cozy and warm, but it helped!

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I can’t tell you how this saying came about, but I do recall a day when I saw someone crying over spilled milk. The someone wasn’t a child. It was my dad. And the milk wasn’t the small amount in a glass. It was a lot of milk. For years my parents tried to scratch a living out of a hardscrabble little farm near Mulberry Grove, Illinois. There wasn’t much money to be made from farming in those days, at least not from farming on our scale. . .

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Our two sons, their wives and their children were all present for the Christmas gathering. Turkey, ham, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, corn, sweet potatoes, and homemade bread were on the table. When the moment came that we had been eagerly anticipating, we took our seats. As soon as our youngest grandchild, Eramin, was comfortably situated in her high chair, she surveyed the table and asked:
“Where are the donuts?”

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The dog of Angelo del Plato watched intently as his master was lowered into the grave. Eight years later, friends of the family acknowledged that they could not remember a day when that loving dog did not visit his master’s gravesite, usually sitting a while on the turf over his master’s body… Even those who are not dog lovers must admire and commend the faithfulness of that dog to his master. It is a sharp rebuke to many Christians for their lack of faithfulness to their Master!

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When disappointments come our way, we may think that God has failed us and forsaken us. But Scripture assures us that such things are never the case. The Lord went with Paul even though it seemed his pathway was being blocked. He never sends His people into difficult circumstances without going with them. If God is with us in our disappointments, the thing we must do to help ourselves face those disappointments is focus on Him.

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He would be driving to his work in his old pickup truck and I would be driving to my study. I used to tease him about that truck. It had so many holes in it that I dubbed it a “see-through” truck. What I most remember about those meetings is not the sight of his beat-up pickup. It is rather what Pete would do when he spotted me. He would smile and give me the thumbs-up sign. I never felt like I needed an explanation. I took his thumbs-up sign to mean: “Be encouraged! Everything is going to be okay!”

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