Scattered Moments
Brief reflections on faith, adversity, and the quiet places where grace appears.
Each episode of Scattered Moments is a brief journey through the unexpected classrooms where God does His deepest work — hospital rooms and sanctuaries, seasons of grief and flashes of joy, the ordinary moments where grace shows up and changes everything.
Drawing from over forty years of writing, ministry, and life in the trenches, Matt Tullos weaves together original poetry, hymn stories, Scripture, and honest reflection to remind you that even adversity, you are not alone.
Three Types of Episodes:
Scattered Moments: Brief Reflections on Faith, Adversity and the Quiet Places
Guided Meditations: Opportunities to Encounter God through Meditation
Moments Almanac: Released Every Morning, Reflecting on the Meaning of Each Day,
Take heart, notice the scattered moments, and share the grace.
Scattered Moments
July 24 |Moments Almanac | Ready
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844 people boarded a ship they had every reason to trust. Within two minutes, hundreds were gone.
In this episode of Moments Almanac, we remember the tragic sinking of the Eastland on July 24, 1915—one of America's deadliest maritime disasters—and the birth of Oswald Chambers, whose quiet life of daily obedience continues to shape millions through My Utmost for His Highest.
What do a capsized ship and a devotional writer have in common?
Both remind us that life is uncertain, tomorrow is never guaranteed, and faithfulness is found not in extraordinary moments but in the ordinary minutes God places before us today.
Drawing from Proverbs 27 and Psalm 90, this episode reflects on the fragility of life, the wisdom of numbering our days, and the timeless call to trust God and obey Him—one moment at a time.
Take heart. Notice the scattered moments. Share the grace.
Welcome to Moments Almanac on Scattered Moments. Today is July 24th. On the morning of July 24th, 1915, more than 2,000 Western electric employees and their families climbed aboard five steamships tied up along the Chicago River. They wore their Sunday best for a Saturday outing and crowded the rails of a ship called the Eastland to wave at friends still on the dock. Nobody boarding that morning knew the Eastland had been quietly retrofitted over the years with extra decks making her dangerously top heavy. At 728, still tied to the pier, the Eastland rolled on to her side in twenty five feet of water. In less than two minutes, eight hundred and forty four people were dead, most of them without ever leaving the dock. It remains one of the deadliest disasters in American history, and almost no one saw it coming, because there was nothing to see, no storm, no fire, no collision. Just an ordinary Saturday that tipped over. Forty one years earlier, on that same day, july twenty fourth, a Baptist minister's son named Oswald Chambers was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. Chambers grew up watching his father preach, and as a teenager, he heard Charles Spurgeon, an encounter that shaped how seriously he took what it meant to belong to Christ. He drifted into theology almost by accident, and eventually found his calling not in one dramatic moment, but in a discipline of daily obedience, faithfulness proven in the next five minutes, not some future achievement. He founded a small Bible college in London, then closed it to serve as a wartime chaplain in Egypt, ministering to soldiers headed for Gallipoli. He died there in nineteen seventeen at just forty three from complications after giving up a hospital bed to a wounded soldier who needed it more. His wife Biddy spent the rest of her life transcribing his sermons from shorthand notes, and one became my utmost for his highest. Still read daily more than a century later, Chambers never wrote a survival guide for catastrophe. He wrote about staying ready in the ordinary five minutes that would make up most of a life. Which is a strange kinship between a devotional writer and a sinking ship, I know. The Eastland passengers had done nothing wrong. They simply boarded a boat that they had every reason to trust. Jesus once warned his disciples, therefore you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. He was not speaking about accidents or predicting disasters, he was teaching his followers to live every ordinary day in a quiet readiness, hearts awake to God, because none of us know when our earthly story will be complete. The book of Proverbs echoes that same wisdom, don't boast about tomorrow for you do not know what the day may bring forth. That's not a threat, it's an invitation to receive today as God's gift instead of assuming tomorrow is ours by right. Chambers, well, he built his life around that kind of readiness, not anxious or morbid, just present enough to obey God in the moment he was given. And perhaps that's why the old hymn still rings true Trust and obey, for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey. The families waving from the Eastland's rail that morning had no warning, and their grief deserves to be taken seriously, not folded into a tiny moral, but their story resting beside chambers on the calendar still asks a question. If today were the whole of it, would anything that truly mattered be left undone? Or, as Moses prayed in Psalm ninety, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Numbering our days is not counting how many remain. It's learning the value of the one that we have been given. Chambers would say the answer isn't found in working harder or feeling more spiritual. It's found in trusting God with today and obeying him in it. The poet Henry Francis Light captured that same quiet confidence. Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day. Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away. Change and decay in all around I see. O thou who changest not, abide with me. History reminds us how fragile life can be. Christ reminds us how faithful God is. And that's today's Moments Almanac for July 24th. I hope you'll join me tomorrow. Until then, take care. Notice the scattered moments, and share the grace.
