sullivan was the quiet one. He was usually the only one who really listened to the counselor.
Sullivan and 11 of his friends had grown up without parents in an old cabin on the outskirts of a big city. They all slept in the same big room and were all woken up each day by the [...]
The Wreckers were five young ballers that played mean game. They were kings of their local court and there was not a middle school team in their league that could beat the five of them, including the rest of the players on their own middle school team. When the high school team wanted a run [...]
The Israelites had enough daily bread to live on, and even had God in their midst, but they wanted more. They built a golden calf and it took 40 years in the desert for God to teach them patience.
I can pay my bills and i have food every day. But I demand Green Monster drinks, i fish for compliments, and im addicted to lust, [...]
When i ask God for all sorts of stuff, it doesn’t spread God’s time or resources too thin. He has infinite of both.
Each request instead gives him permission and momentum to bring his kingdon more fully into mine. And i think that’s what he desires.
Ive had a pretty serious crisis of faith lately. Christians just don’t seem any different than other people: uncommitted church members, highly realized ppl of other faiths, my own continuation in sin. What does it say about our god if we are no different than others.
Maybe it doesnt say anything. People of other faiths that [...]
Little Soren and Cameron were the funniest pair in their elementary school. They were best friends. They laughed all the time. They were both mentally underdeveloped but their hearts were fully grown.
The most important day of their lives had arrived. Today they took the placement test to get into middle school. If they did poorly they would [...]
Isn’t it interesting that having a nice house and beautiful friends is what we aspire to, but the type of story we love hearing is of a person giving their fortune to the poor and hanging out with people who everybody else looks down upon?
I don’t think having lots of money or having beautiful friends are [...]
What if getting a job through nepotism is sort of a good analogy for being saved. Like u don’t really have to worry about getting hired or fired for ur works. It’s instead by who you know.
I guess now that we know that we have the job, we get to prove if we’re in it [...]
I went up to the counter at a gas station today to buy a pair of sunglasses. The girl mentioned she had a headache.
I asked if she was able to get one of the bottles of aspirin on the shelf. She said times were tight and she didn’t get paid until friday.
I had been reading in Acts where [...]
Why the heck do we have to say sorry to God when we wrong others?
Maybe it’s because he loves those people so much that it hurts him when i hurt them.
Oh, and maybe that’s why i need to apologize when in the privacy of my own head i lust or covet or hate. Because God knows im [...]
God, if faith for a lifetime is too much for me, then give me faith for today.
But make it faith that moves mountains.
It seems when reading the Bible Jesus is kind of a hard-ass. He says tough teachings and criticizes all the pastors. He heals people but then tells them you better stop sinning.
I saw a cheesey Jesus movie with the kids at my church the other day. I thought, this is hilarious because Jesus talks so [...]
I used to think justice was the scary part of God.
but I read a Psalm yesterday that made me think, Justice is what will SAVE some of us!
It said that Justice will be served and the poor, oppressed people will recieve the joy they deserve again.
I suppose then the only scary part of Justice is if i was the one [...]
I ordered an ant farm and some of the ants died in the mail.
But, I still expected to have an intricate series of tunnels by now. However, my ants just wander around, moving peices of sand back and then forth again, doing nothing ultimately productive.
I think my queen is dead. And i think my ants are all serving themselves. I [...]
I stumbled on a story about a video game the other day that an old computer programmer wrote. It was called Savvy Avatar. But no one’s heard of it because it was never officially released. Apparently the game sort of self destructed before it debuted. I’ll try to explain the reason the game self destructed, at least as far as i understand it.
The [...]
God, I desire not to play church
Nor to make others think I am good
Nor to do what I think
Will draw them to you
But I desire to be so in love with you
That I will do anything to be near you
That I will love others
because it makes me beautiful to you
that I will invite [...]
once upon a time there was a happy pair of shoes. They walked everywhere with their master. They went so many cool places and it was so much fun.
But sometimes it was hard, too. Sometimes the master hiked up mountains and carried sick people down them. These days the shoes got very worn out and [...]
In the ancient Hard Wired era days, on the mechanical super-planet called Transtemp-earthera, there existed a robot identified as Nicodometer.
Nicodometer was a powerful leader in robot society. He met every day with the other super-computing robots in the supercooled core of Transtemp-earthera. While the rest of Transtemp-earthera’s robots lived closer to the surface and went about their [...]
Gary Hatton was famous for his talk show on politics. He attracted a motley audience. Seemingly random people from both left and right wing camps found themselves drawn to his views.
He wasn’t republican. He wasn’t democrat. He wasn’t even necessarily independent. He just had ideas of how a country could thrive and become healthy. His [...]
Cecilia was a peasant woman working in a factory. This factory produced fine clothing, worthy of dukes and dutchesses at the most brilliant of parties.
But Cecilia rarely saw daylight.
The rules were clear and fair. You must work to earn the room and your food that the factory provided. Anything you earned on top of that could be spent on [...]
Roughly translated from a strip of paper from a scrapbook of a family that lived in a Nazi concentration camp:
January 4, 1945: we are more skeletons then men: hope is basically dead in the camp (like most of my people) and we have basically given up.
not a mouse or even a bug has been seen for months. there is nothing nothing NOTHING left [...]
Arly was the apple of her father’s eye. Carl came home from work every day to the sound of patterring feet and the sight of Arly running to him, arms reaching out. She would sit beside him at dinner and recount everything that happened that day, and he adored it. He usually watched an hour of [...]
Have you ever seen someone so desperately in love that it drives them to absolutely ridiculous measures? It is a thing of imbalanced teenage girls
. . . and the God of the Jews.
Hank Shepherd wrote a song that made him famous. When he was only 21 “Momma’s Eyes” Swept the charts and the hearts of the Country-western world. [...]
sometimes i wonder if I’m lying. All this stuff i tell people about God- what if it’s all fecundity of sub-factual fish feces? This is such a broken world, with so many irreparable people.
. . .
A couple weeks ago i complained these thoughts to my friend, Cliff. He looked at me from across the table and bowed [...]
I have learned so much from my friend Cliff. I want to teach some of his thoughts to the world to honor my friend and share the wealth. Thank you for everything, Cliff.
Cliff has learned that God has made everything beautiful. Breathtaking beauty can be found in a blade of grass, a child’s smile, a stormy [...]
Cliff has taught me that in times of trouble or confusion, guilt or shame, we can think of three things to remind us that God is good and he will take care of us.
1) What has been done: he died and forgave my sin. Therefore have no more shame before the one that really matters.
2) What is happening [...]
I have learned so much from my friend Cliff. I want to teach some of his thoughts to the world to honor my friend and share the wealth. Thank you for everything, Cliff.
Cliff says the key to evangelizing is not to realign a person’s perception, but instead their perspective. What i learned from this is that [...]
I have learned so much from my friend Cliff. I want to teach some of his thoughts to the world to honor my friend and share the wealth. Thank you for everything, Cliff.
Idea #1:
More important than believing that God exists is believing that God is good. This is because if God exists and is a purely selfish God, [...]
A new friend and his wife invited me out to dinner last week. I thought, that’s nice . . . until i showed up and he said, “You get to choose between chicken or steak.”
It was a pyramid scheme marketing dinner. The men up front were trying to sell me a product. I was put off a [...]
when i sincerely pray for something, and it absolutely does not come true, i begin to ask myself, ‘are we just fooling ourselves?’
I have two options at that point. I can say, ‘God must not be real,’ or i can say ‘God must not work in the ways i expect him to work.’
When I watch the breathtaking [...]
When my mom died, people brought over way more food than we could eat. I started telling people to please stop trying to help.
but my dad taught me a lesson that day. he said, “help them, by letting them help you, Ross.”
I have a friend that i help in lots of ways. He really owns nothing that i want, but [...]
the spiritual forces pushing the prevalence of homosexuality have been much more damaging to God’s plan than just increasing sodomy. That is a clever disguise. Modern culture’s increased acceptance of homosexuality is devastating to our work mostly because with it has come the common assumption that Christians “hate” homosexuals. And this entirely undermines our most basic foundational tenant to love. We are often therefore seen as not only haters, [...]
Hello sir or Madam,
it sucks when a boss tells us how to do something even though we think there’s a better way. how do we respond? i’ve been known to do it my way anyway to prove myself, the Christian, right.
when i walked out of my boss’ office the other day, after being proven wrong, i realized something: Our goal is to obey and respect our [...]
i saw a deformed teenager hobbling out of Taco Bell today. He was shorter than my waist. He held the door open for me and then sincerely said “thank you, sir.” - as if i had helped him. The thought of that tender boy has been setting on my heart all afternoon.
my dear schitzofrenic friend, Bonnie called me again this weekend. I just listened for an hour as [...]
What God wants our lives to look like is probably pretty close to what any good parents would want it to.
Not necessarily religious- playing church with crosses, fishes, and Toby Mac plastered on your stuff. i think he wants you to be the healthiest, most level-headed, most passionately alive person that you can be- just like any old mom and dad would want [...]
A friend of mine is a lot like Jesus. He tells people that they’re sinning bad and tells them to shape up. Like Jesus told the woman at the well, the tax collectors, all sorts of sick people to in a sick world to toughen up and right themselves.
But some people won’t talk to my friend [...]
It’s hard to analytically prove that Christ is God in this culture that says everybody can believe what they want and everybody’s beliefs can be correct. And it is near impossible to invert the philosophy that has permeated this generation.
So how can we share the gospel working within this paradigm?
This is how:
When someone says to you, “i can believe what i want.”
Tell him “Me too! Let’s believe in a God [...]
Few words are more precious to me
than these.
As he cried he said,
“You are an answer to my prayer.”
we live in 4 dimensions. we can manipulate the three dimensions of space but are at the mercy of the fourth dimension, time.
To understand what it is like to live in the fifth dimension, picture a book.
This book covers the birth and death of every kingdom and every blade of grass and everything that anyone ever observed [...]
Do I choose my destiny or does God?
Maybe, I choose my destiny, but God made me the type of person that would choose that destiny.
This way i am free to make the decisions i want, and God still gets his way.
I went to visit my friend, Trevor in Oklahoma City this weekend. This friend regularly tells me stories about people that are healed when he prays for them! We were walking through Oklahoma city together and he said, “I’m gonna try something crazy.” I look up and see people walking towards us. I say, “Go for it, man.”
He stops the [...]
I like how good will, and creative generosity can be so contagious. My dad told me a story about a couple that goes to a restaurant and picks out a patron and anonomously foots their bill– and that infected me.
I ate at a restaraunt the other day and told the waitress to let me pay for “that couple’s bill”- I [...]
I had a thought.
A while ago I suggested that it is WE that choose whether or not we will enter heaven, because we are all forgiven. We just must adopt God’s will to enter.
then i thought, how can that be true when Jesus says he will “…separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from [...]
Will we be able to sin in heaven?
I think sin is doing what God doesn’t want us to do, and that is usually something that hurts others for our own gain.
but in Heaven i think we and God will be so united in spirit, that what i want for me is also what is best for you. We [...]
I used to think, if there is a God, he would have to be automatically known to all and the way to him should be written on everybody’s hearts- no instruction manual needed.
From what i’ve gathered in Christian church, the way to God requires that you say a specific name and you say a three step prayer as laid out in the [...]
I think i’ve figured out . . .
Why did God put the tree of good and evil in the garden of eden? (*1)
Why did God have to threaten they would die if they disobeyed? (*2)
Why did God take our punishment when we ate of the tree? (*3)
Here’s a story that shows the whys.
There was once an [...]
I realized the other day that I spend a lot of time in Church, Bible studies, accountability and discipleship groups. I look a lot like a Christian.
Now if I were out helping the needy then I might actually look kind of like Christ.
Ok, gotta run. Got bible study tonight.
Question1: why were we put on earth instead of just staying in heaven? We could have just skipped the arduous step of living on earth- at which some of us fail so miserably.
Question2: why on earth weren’t we given any concrete proof of who God is and what He is like?
Maybe being on Earth is the only way for [...]
I have a friend who breaks horses. He said he is trying to train a young horse to not be afraid of water. He spent an hour this week just trying to get this horse to step into a puddle.
I have a wonderful, safe life. I work hard to keep a consistent job. I brush my teeth and shower. [...]
What makes you mad? traffic jams? Your wife making you late to a party? When the thing you’re building keeps falling apart?
I think that Anger manifests when something gets in the way of something we want to do.
I want to drive to work and get there on time. BUT ALL THESE CARS WON’T GET OUT [...]
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