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Dear Lord, I will remain restless, tense, and dissatisfied until I can be totally at peace in your house. But I am still on the road, still journeying, still tired and weary, and still wondering if I will ever make it to the city on the hill. With Vincent van Gogh, I keep asking your angel, whom I meet on the road: “Does the road … Continue reading A Prayer for Our Journey by H. Nouwen
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“I want you to know I never believed the things people said about you. Those people who said they could see better than you could what your faults are? I never saw what they thought they were seeing in you. All those times you were told that you are lazy or selfish or undisciplined or a stubborn know-it-all? I always thought the people saying those … Continue reading What God Told Me Yesterday
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Would you like to hear my opinion on the controversy de jour? Listen to me rip some idiot to pieces for your edification and amusement? Want my incisive insight into exactly why and how an outrageous, provocative statement is wrong and probably a danger to decent human beings everywhere? Yeah, sorry. Aint going to happen. Or at least not often. Why? Because a human being … Continue reading Stop Worrying About the Idiots!
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God often does not answer my prayers because he knows me. He knows that if he allowed me to enjoy material ease, plenty of affirmation and affection from the people around me, a good name and reputation and eased the intensity of my many imperfections, I would be satisfied. But my satisfaction would be in the good life I had rather than in God himself. … Continue reading The Most Important Reason for Unanswered Prayers
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This week we’ve been looking at common reasons that God doesn’t answer our prayers. Today we’ll look at the problem of people. As in other people. When people refuse to cooperate, refuse to change or follow God’s leading, prayers tend to go unanswered. Sometimes it can be a matter of people who God would have serve as answers to your prayers not taking up the … Continue reading People Are People
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Especially when I was younger, I was prone to saying prayers that amounted to “God, please don’t let reality be reality.’ I would not prepare for a test and ask God to help me do well on it anyways. I would wake up late and ask God to somehow make the 5 minutes I had extend to the 15 minutes I needed. And if the … Continue reading Reality is Reality
Let’s take a quick look at things from God’s perspective. 17 billion years ago or so, God set this creation into motion. Presumably when God did it, it was with the knowledge that eventually a life form such as ourselves would come into existance. But in the meantime, it takes about a million years for the first stars to form. Some explode, some go on … Continue reading God Plays the Long Game
A while ago I shared a story about a woman who needed potatoes. To make potato salad. And apparently she needed a lot of potatoes. I probably wasn’t listening very attentively, because I have no idea why she needed to make potato salad – church picnic, family reunion, Paula Dean was coming for a cook-out, I don’t know. But the woman needed potatoes and had no money for … Continue reading Let’s Talk About Unanswered Prayer
This week we’ve been talking about our dark side and why we don’t need to fear or reject it. Yesterday we talked about bringing our dark side to God. Today, we look how doing this is the key to being able to fulfill our call to be the light of the world. We Christians have a real problem dealing with the sin and darkness of … Continue reading Being Light to a Darkened World
I was in the midst of a fit of enraged blasphemy when I had my first real encounter with God. And do you know what happened? Well, I wasn’t rebuked. I wasn’t chastised or condemned. I wasn’t told to get my act together and fly right. All that happened was that God made his love known. Right there in the middle of my hateful ranting. … Continue reading Illuminating the Dark
The Upside Down World 