Better Late Than Never?
It has been a crazy week, and it is only Tuesday. The rest of the week doesn’t look good either as the sky seems to be falling on my secular job. Good thing it cannot start any sooner than 8:AM and cannot last any later than 5:PM because I simply won’t allow it! However, it does exhaust me, and quite simply, I forgot to post yesterday at all. However, whatever I was going to write about probably would not have been as meaningful (to me anyway) as the post I am going to write now. Last Sunday night, I preached on prayer for the end of the AWANA year service. It is something God has really been working on me about. For so long, I have had issues I have been dealing with on a personal level, and never felt like I could really talk with God until...
What A Week!
Sunday was Easter. Wednesday we had straight line winds that morning with tornadoes that ripped through the state causing a lot of damage and loss of life. Friday there was the Royal wedding. Today, we find out that some time last week Osama Bin Laden was killed by Seal Team 6 in a surgical strike in Abottabad, Pakistan. Anyone remember Egypt from just a few weeks ago? A tsunami a little while before that? A missile strike in Libya that nearly cut off the head of government there? The current economic crisis still underway? Like little children at Christmas jumping from toy to toy, the world and the news media jump from story to story. It is no wonder after all. For the analogy is apt. It is what they do. From the great sadness the earthquake and...
This Is Where The Healing Begins
First, I have to make an announcement. This is unfortunately my last contribution to Fractured Saints. I have tons of other projects I’m working on, so it’s hard for me to keep up. If you still want to read about my wacky adventures, check out my personal blog. Now, on to today’s blog post. A few days ago I was at Panera Bread writing about spiritual abuse in my journal. I wrote about how some of my friends who grew up in abusive environments felt like God was abusive, too. Before I knew it, though, I suddenly started writing about being bullied in school, and how that gave me the impression that God was full of wrath and hatred when I was younger. When I finished writing, I realized that I still had this fear deep down inside me that God...
How We View God
Ever notice how everyone picks up something different from the Bible? I mean, most of us agree on the basics, but I think there are certain attributes of God that different people pick up on more than others. For example, when I started reading the Bible years ago, one thing that I really picked up on was the idea of God as the “father to the fatherless” (Psalm 68:5). My dad wasn’t around when I was growing up, so the idea that God is the father I never had really gave me hope. Another thing that I immediately picked up on was the fact that Jesus’ disciples weren’t the righteous religious types who had their crap together–they were outcasts. Jesus passed by the temples of the high and mighty, and instead went to the...
The completely undeserved “Welcome Home”
If you look over a lot of the posts that I have written in the past couple years for this site, you will see an undercurrent of mild confusion on the Christian life and how I am supposed to live it out. This is especially evident in my last post talking about the difficulty of talking to God in the morning. Well last week, God blew my doors off on my way to work. Through church conversations and reading, I have been more and more shown the importance of the Gospel, that is God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5:8). His work on the cross is what saves us, not our works thereafter. In light of this, I drove into work listening to a song called “Welcome Home” by a band named Radical Face (good band), and...
An Inconvenient Salvation
We recently had Missions Conference at our church, and four outstanding missionaries shared their burden and their vision for missions with our people. It was very well attended, the love offering for the missionary families was very generous, and in what seemed an all too short time, they were gone. I am left now with the memory of another year in which our people were challenged to think outside the walls of our church and gain a vision that will lead to a burden to do something, and do more to see souls saved. I wonder if anything will change. One of the missionaries spoke on this passage particularly: 2Corinthians 5:14 “For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: 15 And that he died for...