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Category: Suffering

God Helps Us to do More than We Can Think or Imagine

God Helps Us to do More than We Can Think or Imagine

God wants you to do more and be more than you can think or imagine. How great is that? I know he wants this for us because in 1 Corinthians, Paul tells us that God is preparing for us things so good that they exceed our imagination; and in Philippians 4, Paul says that the Spirit gives us the power to do all things. An invocation from my prayer book recently summarized it this way: “Almighty God, through the power of your Holy Spirit, you enable us…

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New City’s Pakistan Relief Fund

New City’s Pakistan Relief Fund

The church that Mary and I are a part of wants to be a place that takes the call to be the hands and feet of Jesus seriously.   We want to be a community that makes a difference in the world.  That’s why we’re partnering with One Day’s Wages to try and raise money for the flood victims in Pakistan.  Here’s a blurb from the ODW website: This natural disaster is affecting nearly 20 million people – more than the…

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Honest Abe

Honest Abe

Abraham Lincoln is a legend.  He is known for being a wise, steadfast, and visionary leader who moved the United States through the Civil War and out of slavery.  But that is certainly not how he was known during his lifetime.  He was perceived by many as waffling, inexperienced, and a failure. Lincoln faced repeated setbacks and discouragement.  He was dirt poor growing up and at times he had to forego even the most basic comforts.  He struggled to succeed…

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Only A Suffering God Can Help

Only A Suffering God Can Help

What if God actually helped us?  What if, in our moment of pain, we could pray and our pain would go away?  What if, when we suffered, we could ask God for help and our suffering would actually cease?  That’d be nice.  It would be nice if knowing Christ meant saying goodbye to pain.   But since it doesn’t, I’m glad that Christ suffered. As Jesus was nailed to a cross, God didn’t help him either.  He abandoned him.  And…

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You Can’t Always Get What You Want…

You Can’t Always Get What You Want…

Life’s hard isn’t it?  At some point we’ve all had to come to terms with the fact that we aren’t going to get what we want.  The thing that we won’t get can be as mundane as a new camera or as meaningful as a new job, a spouse, or a child.  Sometimes, even with the most important things, we have to face the reality that we can’t always get what we want. What I’ve found is that in these…

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Good Christians are Called Atheists

Good Christians are Called Atheists

There’s often a lot of talk by Christians lamenting the non-religious nature of our government, but what I find ironic is that the early Christians faced criticism from the government lamenting that they weren’t religious!  The Roman Government repeatedly called Christians atheists and even killed them for it.  In fact, the first martyrdom recorded in Christian history outside the pages of the New Testament was due to just such a fact.  Polycarp, a devoted Christian was killed for not being…

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Blessed are those who bust human traffickers

Blessed are those who bust human traffickers

Last night on my way back from Denver I had the privilege of sitting next to a cop.  This individual was working on a case aimed at arresting some people engaged in sex-trafficking.  She shared some stories, and she talked about the anger she feels when she hears the stories of abuse that these girls are subjected to.  It was sad to hear, but it was also a shocking reminder.  It’s all too easy to forget that slavery, human trafficking,…

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Honesty

Honesty

At breakfast one morning, a wife looks at her husband as he reads the financial page of the newspaper, just as he has done every morning for the past twenty years.  She longs to yank away the paper and tell him she is just as in love with him today as she was the day they were married.  But she isn’t sure it’s true.  She isn’t sure he loves her.  She isn’t even sure who he is anymore.  She stares…

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believe by jennifer silvera

believe by jennifer silvera

Thoughts from Mary (My first attempt at blogging) As a counselor, I am struck again and again by the universal nature and influence of death and loss.  Everyone has or will lose someone they love.  It is only a matter of time.  While death is universally experienced by all, grief is processed so differently and individually.  But everyone has to answer the question, “How do I go on and how do I live?”   I just finished Believe: A Young Widow’s…

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The Pain Principle

The Pain Principle

In Dave Gibbons new book, he argues that successful leaders will be third culture leaders–leaders who are liquid and adaptable to the changing cultural landscape that is globalization. Throughout the book he sets out to define what this looks like for the church and her leaders. One of the attributes of this sort of leader is what he calls the pain principle: The pain principle grows out of two axioms: (1) For leaders, pain in life has a way of…

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