Are you broken? What do you think? Could there be any beauty in brokenness? Yes, there can be. Especially if we surrender all the pieces to God. He is ready to create something new out of the messes of our lives. We are confident that God is able to orchestrate everything to work toward something good and beautiful when we love Him and accept His invitation to live according to His plan. (Romans 8:28, VOICE) Kurt Bubna in his new…
Lately I’ve been thinking how our faith could be expressed in love. You know, even the Bible tells us that our faith should be activated through love. How can we do it? Because it’s not so easy. Life is messy and relationships complicated. Our initial response in life, unfortunately, is not often love. So. What to do? How to get from war to love, from angst to alleluia? For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion…
At the end of life your heart will be either hard or tender. You can be either bitter or better, despite what has happened to you. Really. Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flow the springs of life. (Proverbs 4:23, AMP) We are called to guard our heart. We are called to ooze love and grace. But how can we if our hearts have been walked on? How can…
This message will be short and sweet but extremely important: Don’t let anything keep you away from God. Don’t let anything keep you from receiving the gift of faith. Don’t let anything keep you from embracing grace day by day. There’s nothing in your past that could make God love you less. Don’t give in to shame. There’s no mess that big that would keep God granting you grace. Don’t give in to shame. There’s nothing that makes you unqualified…
Failure is something that we try to avoid at all costs. We think it will be the end of the world. Or, at least, the end of our personal world. But kingdom living IS upside down living. Failure is not the end in the kingdom of God. It is the beginning. Because when we have reached the lowest point, we are open for God in our lives. Then we are, like apostle Paul, ready to trust God and not our…
Last Friday I shared about my lowest point in my life and how God has wondrously healed me. But for a long time I carried around regrets. If I only could have seen it coming. If I only had not married him in the first place. If I only…. you get the picture. But then God taught me that he can use everything for his glory. Like Mary DeMuth writes in her Everything book “Jesus wastes none of our stories,…
What if instead of people asking ‘how are you doing?’, they asked ‘how is your prayer life?’ That would tell us much more of a person’s well-being, don’t you think? If our prayer life is robust, we are well in Christ. If our prayer life’s been hit by a dry spell, we are not doing that well.
Have you ever been so severely crushed that you thought you’re never going to recover? Have you been in such a storm that you thought you’re never going to make it? I’ve been there. But because of God’s mighty grace I made it. Most people don’t even guess I’d ever experienced anything so publicly humiliating and personally devastating. I’ve experienced God’s healing grace like Mary DeMuth writes in her new book Everything: “He [God] wants us to heal so fully…
People try to fill the emptiness they feel inside with so many different things without succeeding. One way to avoid feeling emptiness is to stay extremely busy and connected with the world all the time. Hence they don’t have time to ponder why they are so restless and unhappy. But if you don’t take time to sit still, you can’t really hear God. And like Augustinus has said it so well “God, you have made us for yourself, and our…
Have you ever been so broken, shattered into zillion little pieces, that you were sure there was no hope for you? Or are you heart-broken right now? There’s good news for broken people! In Jesus all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies! There’s hope because of Jesus’ blood that poured down from the cross! He [Jesus] was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the…
