The story is told of a young preach- er named Augustus Toplady, who was taking a walk through the English countryside when a sudden storm swept across the landscape. Toplady spotted a wide rock formation with an opening—a cleft—where he sought shelter until the storm passed. As he sat out the deluge, he contemplated the connection between his shelter and God’s help in life’s storms.

In a TV commercial I saw recently, the kids argued in the back seat of the car about where to stop for dinner. One wanted pizza; another chicken. Mom, in the front passenger seat, said, “No, we’ll stop for a hamburger.”

I once resolved to read all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays in one year. To my surprise, fulfilling the task seemed far more like entertainment than work. I expected to learn about Shakespeare’s world and the people who inhabited it, but I found that Shakespeare mainly taught me about my world.