Sermons On The Second Readings
For Sundays In Advent, Christmas, And Epiphany
The chasm between the realities in which two different people live can be vast. Such was the case in July of 2000 in Pompano Beach, Florida. Jamie Dean Petron, aged 41, had killed and injured two victims in a robbery there, when he then forced his way into the home of seventeen-year-old Althea Mills, who was there with some younger relatives.
Althea was threatened by the gunman, but she said that she kept taking comfort from a verse of scripture she had learned, 2 Timothy 1:7: "... for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control."