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Showing posts from January, 2011

Recognizing the Battle

The improvements in my wife’s health have relaxed over the past several days. It felt like things were slipping away, for the worse. Fears of another very difficult stretch of life were creeping into my mind. I also felt doubts. Doubt that God is good. Doubt that God is in control and working to brings good things to those who love him. This time, I did not indulge my low feelings or my doubts. I fought them. I prayed that God would defeat them and help me to live with by faith, not by sight or reason. “God, fill me with the Holy Spirit and make his voice loud in my soul.” I watched a sermon on spiritual warfare and a second on the Holy Spirit. I felt I was refocusing on God and living my life according to his faithfulness. I read in God’s word from Psalms when King David was delivered from the hands of his enemies who had kept him on the run and in hardship fearing for his very life. He felt like God wasn’t doing anything to deliver him for a long time; his heart ached. He kept moving

Lesson on prayer.

I believe God is teaching me an important lesson. He is more powerful than I. Shocking, I know. Yet, I'd estimate that we all behave like we are both more powerful and wise than God himself. I’ve noticed in the past that even when I had an enlightened and scripturally sound piece of advice for someone’s particular dilemma, though I spoke it, it was not received. I then turned to prayer... and in the matter of days, the unreceptive person came to the conviction to which I had attempted to lead. This pattern has happened time and time again. Fast forward to the current; I am conducting a group on Facebook to promote daily reading of God’s word as I did for the first time in 2010. I called it Pursuit365. My experience has so transformed my heart, life and actions and given me a hope and a future that I want to see other people’s lives affected the way mine has. Many people started this group quite enthusiastic and energized... then they start to fall away. Quickly. It’s been a mere tw

Kissed at 22

I didn't kiss a girl until I was the ripe age of 22. Pathetic. I had plenty of desire to kiss a girl, don't get me wrong. I was just painful awkward internally. I think I projected a fair amount of confidence, but like a coward, I stayed away from any and all social risk. I'm not entirely sure why. I remember in high school, a co-ed pointed out to me that if I was ever going to get a girlfriend I needed to be able to "look a girl in the eye"... Maybe I didn't project confidence after all; I felt shame that she noticed my flaw. I remember having many such moments, even from an early age. I was around six years of age, a mature six I believed in my mind, when a hostess at Quail Creek said, "what a handsome young man"... Hide me. Hide me. Don't cry! Be strong... I was mortified yet again. Ridiculous as it was, that is what I felt... SHAME. This event left a powerful memory burned into the retina of my hippocampus like a cigarette igniting a C

Patient Quotes

An 84 year old man told me this one morning, "I woke up standing against the wall with some young guy holding me... There was blood everywhere! I thought maybe I'd killed someone!" An old and quite obese lady with a deep smoker frog voice had her gown pulled down quite a bit for all to see... She looks down and says "sexy, ain't it." I posed the question "whats going on today?" to this little old war vet with no legs, only one arm, and one finger... He replied, "I'm just trying to get a nice piece of ass." I told this older gentleman, "well, the drug screen came up positive for cocaine." he replies, "oh... I think someone was smoking it near me." David

Substantial Faith

"only a real risk tests the reality of a belief" - CS LEWIS. Without the supremely difficult times in life, your "belief" in God is merely a shadow of a belief until it has been put to the test of a grave risk. I have been put to the test of steep risk over these past several years. I have seen the darkest and most hopeless seeming days. I cried out in the severe agony of seemingly eternal night. However, I always had a keen sense that I had to choose whether or not to stand by my faith and call on my Lord to deliver me. Mind you, this is the very same lord that sent me out into this nocturnal desert, fully aware of the sheer pain I was to encounter. Can I trust Him who knowingly sacrificed me into this kind of suffering for the sake of another to deliver me... or at minimum sustain, me?? Shall stand by my belief. Shall I continue to serve? Shall I continue to "lose my life" or "die to myself"??????? As painful as it was, I always answered thos