In his book If You Want to Walk on Water . . . John Ortberg weighs in on the subject of waiting: “In some ways, ‘waiting on the Lord” is the hardest part of trusting. It is not the same as ‘waiting around’. It is putting yourself with utter vulnerability in his hands.” This is […]
John Ortberg bases his book If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat on Matthew 14: 25-32, when Peter walks on water to meet Jesus. In his preface the author asserts: “I believe that there is some aspect of your life in which God is calling you to […]
It takes a concerted effort to be thankful or have a spirit of gratitude when going through a time of adversity. In such moments Paul’s words of encouragement to the Thessalonians to “give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18) remind us of God’s call for us to proclaim our trust in Him in good […]
Remember that simple old piano piece, “Heart and Soul”? It takes two people synchronizing their efforts to make it work. That’s also how we get transformed through adversity, by aligning our souls with God’s perfect will and timing, rather than trying to hurry the process. In The Peace God Promises, Ann Spangler relates the story of an […]
God calls us to pray for each other, because when you pray for someone you can’t pronounce judgment against them, no matter great your dislike. Ann Spangler offers this quote from Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom […]
All teachers know that classroom management, aka student obedience, is the key to a successful learning experience. Obedience also is essential to successful transformation in our adversity. Often, however, we make our desert or Land Between time much more difficult than it needs to be because we aren’t obedient to God. The Children of Israel spent […]
Whether we’re seeking to fulfill our desires or trying to resist our adversity, author Ann Spangler (The Peace God Promises) tells us that if we attempt to go it alone, without God, that’s comparable to our path ahead being obscured by fog or the fog being so dense we don’t realize there’s a path at […]
When you recall the principal individuals involved in your downsizing or ministry loss, how do you feel? For several years after my teaching ministry ended, my operative feeling was ‘anger’. I began to heal when I looked at those individuals through Jesus’ eyes rather than my own. Ann Spangler titled Chapter 4 of The Peace […]
Yesterday I commented on the idea of being able to shape our memories. No matter how we might describe the depth of our pain, ranging from minimal to unbearable, we can choose to view those memories not from the perspective of what was done to us but rather what God has done for us. Ann Spangler ( The Peace […]
In The Peace God Promises, Ann Spangler quotes Miroslav Volf, a professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School: “We are not just shaped by memories: we ourselves shape the memories that shape us.” Put another way, while the factual memories of our downsizing or ministry loss are a given, our interpretation or response to […]
When adversity comes, we can’t afford to indulge ourselves in negative thinking patterns. As Ann Spangler warns in The Peace God Promises: “. . . if we develop a pattern of negative thinking, we risk becoming ‘practical atheists’, people who call themselves Christians even though they think and act like atheists.” When you feel your […]
In his book Know Doubt, author John Ortberg quotes the complaint of Yemelian Yaroslavsky, who was chairman of Stalin’s League of the Militant Godless: “Christianity is like a nail. The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.” During your time of adversity, do you find that it strengthens your faith, or do you identify […]