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 […]
In The Peace God Promises, Ann Spangler notes that to truly experience the peace of God in our lives, it’s essential to honestly examine the many stories and experiences that define who we are as well as our responses to the people and events around us. She continues by explaining why: “Because these narratives are […]
In what ways would you complete this sentence: “I could have the peace I long for if only. . .”? In her book The Peace God Promises, author Ann Spangler reflects on that concept: ” Each of us can come up with our list of ‘if onlys’- of the things or the people who make […]
In his book The Calling; Live a Life of Significance, Dr. Kurt Senske has this thought on responding to life’s challenges: “When we suffer the loss of someone or something we love, we also lose a part of ourselves. It is a time of great vulnerability. We might rage against God, blame others, feel entitled, […]
In his book Know Doubt, John Ortberg states that the evidence of lives changed by Jesus is so abundant that it can’t be matched by any other religion, culture, or world view. To prove his point, he offers this telling comment that he’s never heard anyone actually say: “One day I realized there was no […]
Nicholas Wolterstorff (cited by John Ortberg in Know Doubt), American philosopher and Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, defined faith with this simile: “Faith is a footbridge that you don’t know will hold you up over the chasm until you’re forced to walk out onto it.” Sooner or later, all the Christian education you’ve […]