“The Man of a Million Lies”

His Italian mother named him after Saint Mark in the hopes that he would always tell the gospel truth. Yet when he later wrote a bestseller about his travels, cynics called it a book of a million lies. He was nicknamed Mark of a Million Lies.

In the 1200’s, Europeans found it impossible to believe Mark’s tales of a 24-year odyssey that took him across the steppes of Russia, over mountains in Afghanistan, through deserts in Persia, and around the Himalayas into the far reaches of Asia.

Mark was one of the first Europeans to enter China. Through amazing circumstances, he became a favorite of the most powerful man on earth. Kublai Khan ruled over a domain that eclipsed the ancient Roman Empire. Mark saw cities that made Western capitals look like roadside villages. The Khan’s palace dwarfed the largest cathedrals and castles in Europe. It was so massive that its banquet hall could seat 6,000 guests, all dining on plates of pure gold. He saw the world’s first paper money and marveled at the explosive power of gunpowder. It would be 500 years before Europe would produce as much steel as China manufactured in 1267, and 600 years before the Pony Express would equal the speed of Kublai Khan’s postal service.

Mark began his journey home to Venice loaded down with gold, silk, and spices. According to some accounts, tucked away in his pocket was a recipe for that Chinese culinary delight, pasta. The Khan had sent him on his way with a royal guard of 1,000 men. By the time they reached the Indian Ocean, 600 had drowned or died of disease. A ragged Mark barely limped home, most of his riches lost along the way.

Folks dismissed his stories, and it wasn’t long before he landed in jail. In that lonely dungeon, he dictated his fantastic work to a writer of romance novels. Those stories were marketed as The Novels of Marco Polo. But a skeptical public dismissed it as a book of a million lies.

Mark got out of that prison and went on to make another fortune. Yet he never shook that moniker, Marco the Liar. As he lay on his deathbed, his family, friends, and parish priest implored him to recant his fabrications lest they land him in hell. Mark spit out his final words: “I have not even told you have of what I saw.”

Medieval cynics dismissed his stories as the tall tales of a lunatic or a liar. Yet history has established the credibility of The Travels of Marco Polo. A century later, another Italian read Mark’s stories. By the time Christopher Columbus finished them, a dream was sparked that he, too, could discover new worlds.

Is there anything sadder than folks who are afraid to dream big or explore new worlds? Don’t you dare be one of them! Allow Mark’s story to send you out today with a sense of excitement, keeping this in mind: You haven’t seen the half of all the wonders that are still out there.

1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “Eye has not see, nor ear heard, nor have entered the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”

The Triumph of Bubbles

When Belle Silverman was born with bubbles in her mouth, her immigrant mother gave her a nickname that lasted a lifetime. Yet life was anything but bubbly for the girl called Bubbles. Brooklyn neighbors exclaimed that her golden curls and precocious talent made her a Jewish Shirley Temple. Those compliments became a curse when her obsessive stage mom stole Bubbles’ childhood by dragging her to endless auditions for roles in radio, movies, and vaudeville. Mrs. Silverman was sure that her Shirley Temple look-alike was their ticket out of poverty. Repeated rejections at those auditions traumatized little Bubbles. So did the look of disappointment in her mother’s eyes.

When she was 16, her voice teacher said that she was tailor made for the opera. But nothing ever came easy for Bubbles. She spent 10 frustrating years on the road trying to make it in second-tier operas. The New York City Opera turned her down 7 times before they accepted her. When Bubbles finally snagged a starring role, critics panned her performances as uneven. Leading opera houses refused to let her appear on their stages. It was only after she went to Europe and won over the toughest opera fans in the world that critics begrudgingly recognized her magnificent voice.

Even when she became a star at the Met and Time magazine dubbed her Queen of the Opera, her adoring public never knew that Bubbles was raising two children with disabilities. One of them was severely cognitively disabled. She spent a fortune building a sanctuary for her kids in Martha’s Vineyard. After they moved in, it burned to the ground. Then her husband collapsed with a stroke. She cared for him for 8 years while raising two children with special needs and juggling a demanding career.

You might think that a lifetime of setbacks would make Belle Silverman from Crown Heights a sour woman. But the lady nicknamed Bubbles plowed through her troubles with infectious joy. Barbara Walters called her the happiest person on earth. After a 60 minutes interview, Mike Wallace said that she was the most impressive person he had ever met. When he asked her how she had overcome bitterness to be so bubbly, she replied, “I can’t control the circumstances of my life, but I can choose to be joyful.”

You may remember Belle Silverman by her stage name, Beverly Sills. When Bell died in 2007, a New York Times obituary proclaimed the Brooklyn-born soprano to be America’s most popular opera star since Enrico Caruso. But to family and friends, she will always remain Bubbles. 2 years before her death, she summed up her challenges and triumphs to a Times reporter: “Man plans, and God laughs. I’ve never considered myself a happy woman. How could I be with all that’s happened to me? But I choose to be a cheerful woman.” When you face speed bumps on life’s road, it might help to recall this line from Bubbles: “Circumstances are often beyond your choice, but you can choose to be cheerful.”

Proverbs 12:25 says, “Worry weighs a person down; an encouraging word cheers a person up.”

A Mouse That Roared

He hated the name that his missionary mother gave him at birth. As a run fighting for a spot on the rugby fields, he figured that Henry was a sissy’s name. But it wasn’t as bad as the nickname his classmates gave him: the Mouse.

After college, the Mouse returned to China to teach chemistry at a boys’ school. When bloody civil war broke out, he went where the fighting was fiercest. His wife begged him not to go, but he was determined to go to those in greatest need. When the Japanese later invaded China, the Mouse sent his family to Canada but refused to leave his mission. It wasn’t long before he landed in a concentration camp. He was a quiet hero in that barbed-wire mission field before a brain tumor threatened his life. Winston Churchill pleaded with the Japanese to release him. But when the prisoner exchange took place, the Mouse gave up his spot to a pregnant woman. Not longer after, he died in that Japanese camp.

Why was this prisoner so important that the British prime minister personally intervened for his release? Perhaps Churchill recalled a day twenty years earlier when the Mouse roared on the center stage of Olympic history. In 1924 Henry was known by his middle name, Eric. Sportswriters called him the Flying Scotsman. You might have watched his inspiring story in the Oscar-winning film “Chariots of Fire.” At the Paris Olympics he won a gold medal. But a number of Olympians did that in 1924.

The Mouse made headlines for another reason: he refused to run when he discovered that the qualifying heats for his races were set for Sunday. Raised a strict Presbyterian, he believed that it was a sin to compete in athletics on the Sabbath. So the Mouse decided that standing on principle trumped running for gold. When the British Olympic committee pleaded with him to run for king and country, he refused to budge. His stand seems quaintly old-fashioned in an age where sports dominate our Sundays.

The Mouse went to church while others competed. He lost two gold medals but gained the respect of the world for his unwavering integrity. Later that week, he did win a gold medal, setting a world record that stood for a decade. Could it be that this principled stand in Paris produced a hero in China twenty years later? Maybe it was his character as much as his athletic prowess that led to a 2002 poll naming him Scotland’s most popular sports figure of all time.

Mice can roar like lions when there’s conviction in their bellies. A single mouse standing its ground has been known to stampede bull elephants. You might not agree with Henry Eric Liddell’s view on the Sabbath, but in an age of compromise his story is worth remembering. There are some principles that far outweigh gold medals. Certainly this much is true.

If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.

“Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” – Matthew 7:13-14, NIV

A Higher Mind

1 Corinthians 2:16 boldly proclaimed, “We have the mind of Christ.”

At first glance, Paul’s claim is boastful. It would not go over well in our “politically correct” culture of today. It probably did not go over well in the Corinthian culture then, except within the church. There, it would have been a treasured truth and an amazing revelation.

So it is with us. It is almost unthinkable: the mind of the One through whom the entire universe was created, the fount of all wisdom, is available to us. We are not limited to human reasoning. We are not bound by the limitations of history’s greatest thinkers, who, while often exceeding human standards of intelligence, have all fallen drastically short of discovering eternal truth by natural means. Now, we have a supernatural access to ultimate reality from an eternal perspective. We know the direction of history and where it is leading; we know how to escape this fallen world; and we know who holds all power in the palm of His right hand. This vast, incomprehensible treasure is ours – if we will accept it and act upon it.

That’s our problem. We often resort to lesser means of wisdom because we’re unaware of that the mind of Christ is accessible, or we’re unable to believe such an extravagant promise. But if we can’t believe it, we can’t have it. The mind of Christ is ours through the Spirit of God, who comes us through the born again experience. The Spirit searches the deep things of God (v.10) and reveals them to His people. Such things are foolish to the world, but they are truth nonetheless – truth that we can know and base our lives on.

You have your own mind. You also have Christ’s. Which would you rather depend on? Begin each day by disavowing your own wisdom. We must acknowledge that we do not have the understanding ot make the decisions we will face each day. We do not know all the details or future implications of any decision. But God does, and He makes His wisdom available. As a child of God, acknowledge your utter dependence on the mind of Christ, ask for His wisdom, and believe.