The Rise of the Planet of the Twins!

I have not posted since Monday as I have been a bit "under the weather." After a visit to the doctor yesterday ... and starting a round of meds, I am feeling somewhat better today. My voice is gradually returning (it got lost somewhere early Tuesday). I am doing my best to rest it so I will be up to preaching on this upcoming Sunday.

My twin and I at age 2
(can you guess which one is me?

Did you hear that the birth rate for twins here in the United States is up ... I mean up substantially? I am a twin. And when I was born 8 1/2 minutes after my brother ... we were among a pretty select group! In 1956, only about one in every one hundred births were twins. I was reminded about our "special status" when people would always ask my parents, "How are the twins?" My guess is that many of them did not even know our names!!!

Today ... the U.S. birth rate for twins is now about 1 in every 30 births. Quite the increase! And I am not surprised by that as our church family saw two sets of twins born within a couple of months of one another in 2011. Now there are a number of reasons for this increase (check out the AP news article).

As I reflected on this trend, memories of growing up as a twin flooded my mind. Of course, there are memories of stories that my parents and older sisters would tell of us twins' escapades as toddlers (like washing all of my dad's ties in the toilet -- hey, we were just trying to help mommy do the laundry!). But there are also memories of laying in bed at night and playing flashlight tag or just talking about school and friends.

Oh ... and there's one other memory I have that makes me chuckle. My twin and I developed a language that only he and I could understand. That was just fine and dandy when we were just communicating with each other ... but made it difficult when we wanted to communicate with those outside our twin circle. In fact, our speech was so bad that when we hit elementary school, we had to go to speech class every week. There a speech therapist would show us a flash card and teach us to pronounce the word correctly. So ... I guess I learned something from those sessions as I seem to get most words pronounced correctly!

Well, my brother and I had our "secret" language ... but I am so glad that God does not have some "secret" language. He speaks to us plainly in His Word, the Bible. You don't need to decode it ... you don't need to get a graduate degree to  understand it. But you do need to be IN IT!  SOOO ... are you REGULARLY in the Scripture? Do you have some sort of Bible reading plan? And are you working that plan?  If you want to check out some really good (and really diverse) Bible reading plans, go to YouVersion.com.  If you have a smart phone or tablet, you can even download a free app (it's what I use).


Thanks for stopping by . . .
pj