Dear Family and Friends at Trinity,

    Yes. I had a wonderful, educational, fun and exhausting time on my recent trip to the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Out of respect for you, I will not bore you with the details, unless you ask!  By the time you read this, I will be on another grand adventure, this time in Alaska. It is an ‘expedition cruise”. It should be interesting,  I am not the kayaking, hiking, exploring type; I think I will just wave “Good-bye, have fun” to my friend as she ventures forth, and stay on board reading a good murder mystery and eating chocolate chip cookies.

  I do not want to talk about vacations, even though they are on many people’s minds as vacation time draws to a close for families, students and teachers alike.  I would like to talk instead about “Trades”.  I recently traded a piece of yard care equipment I do not need for some man-work hours I do need, but that is not the kind of trade I want to talk about either.  Frankly, I usually come out on the losing end of those kinds of deals.

  I want to talk, instead, about trading people.   If you are a sports fan, you know there are always trades being made, or being rumored.  Teams are always negotiating this player for that player, as if they were simply merchandise to be put in a shopping bag and carried off. There are of course players begging, for one reason or another-usually money—to be traded.  Trading is part of the business of sports; it goes with the territory, or playing field.

  If you follow the news, you are well aware of the trade negotiations going on between the US and Russia for prisoners held by both.  Russia is holding a US basketball player Brittney Griner and former US Marine Paul Whelen. Griner pleaded guilty to a drug charge (forced confession or not, we will probably never know), and Whelen was convicted on espionage charges which he has always denied.  The US is holding Russian arms trader Viktor Bout.  The possibility of still other trades, in this situation referred to as “prisoner exchanges”

are rumored to being tossed about as well, but those are still unclear.

  You may not think prisoner exchanges should be made or that the exchange is not fair, a sports figure for a notorious arms dealer who has brought death to many people.  You may think that exchanges like this weaken negotiating power and actually create more hostage type situations.  You many think that such exchanges are wise, regardless of the situations that made people prisoners in the first place, because they save individual lives.  Frankly, it matters little what you and I think about these exchanges, I seriously doubt that our government, or any government is going to ask for our opinions!

  There is, or was, however one trade, one prisoner exchange for which we all need to be grateful. It was, by anyone’s standards a totally unfair exchange—a world full of sinners for the life of one sinless man.  We were, according to the Scriptures, prisoners, held captive to sin and death, until God exchanged His Son for our souls.  We were guilty, no jury deliberation needed for that; we were set free by the blood of Jesus.  Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome (and therefore to us) makes this perfectly clear in chapter 3:23-25

For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.

Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous.

He did this through Jesus Christ when He freed us from the penalty for our sin.

For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin.

People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed His life….

Now, my friends, that is a trade that should bring us to our knees in thanksgiving and praise!  It is also a trade we should broadcast to the world.  pjr