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Forgiving Yourself
“When you are unforgiving toward yourself, it often yields a sense of isolation. You tell yourself that if you can’t forgive yourself, neither can anyone else, including God. But you are not alone. Jesus is with you in the fiery furnace. You will need to go to God to deal with the messages you keep sending yourselfthe ruminations. You need to recognize up front how you might be making the problems worse. Decide to deal with it. Today you will begin the path to forgiving yourself.”
Excerpted from Moving Forward by Everett L. Worthington, Jr.
Daily Reflection: What is one thing you have trouble forgiving yourself for, and how can you turn it over to the Lord?
Tend Your Soul
“Saphora put the Bible beside her pocketbook and turned out the light. She lay in the dark listening to nothing at all. Even Luke was not digging. The river creatures had fallen quiet as if the earth were taking a big pause. As if waiting for her to notice that all these years, in spite of her occasional prayers, she’d neglected a part of herself a connection to God. Maybe the soul needed to be tended the same as the mind or the body. Or else what was real crowded out what could be.
Excerpted from The Pirate Queen by Patricia Hickman
Daily Reflection: Are you tending your soul as well as you tend your mind and body?
The Time to Decide
“We came across a newspaper story about a World War II vet named B. J. “Bernie” Baker who was told he was dying of bone cancer. Given only two years to live, he told the doctors to fight the disease with everything possible. “Give me the treatments,” he said. “I’ll keep living my life.” Meanwhile he and his wife found time for a motor-home drive to Alaska, a fishing excursion to Costa Rica, and several trips to Florida.
Nine years after the diagnosis, he was struggling with shortage of breath and loss of strength but said, “I’m going to keep fighting. Might as well.”
Those words were not said in resignation. They were the words of a fighter, a real man, a man who had faced bombs and machine-gun fire in the South Pacific before returning to America [ … ]
Let go of performing
“Kingdom life thrives also in the beautiful ordinary, not just when we’re doing ministry or working at a church.
If you’re a writer, let God use your interests and abilities to grow His kingdom in you and through you. That doesn’t require that you write only about Jesus or put a fish symbol on your manuscript. It means that you write as one who lives for and in another dimension.
If you’re a businessperson, don’t bow your knee to fame, money, or making a name for yourself. Instead, excel in your area of expertise so that people can see what good, true, and beautiful business looks like.
If you’re a musician, architect, stay-at-home mother, or the guy with the burrito cart in Pioneer Courthouse Square, the kingdom of God is here and is inviting you to collaborate with what God [ … ]
Your Love Story
“How do you fill your life and your mind with God-talk? The Bible is full of life-affirming messages. It is, at its heart, a love story. It is a story of a loving God, who created you to love you and be loved by you. Like every great love story, there is a separation, which must be overcome by terrible sacrifice. Through God’s sacrifice of his Son, Jesus, you are able to confidently say, ‘I can live happily ever after.’
As good as these affirmations are, however, they must be supported by action. Positive self-talk and an acknowledgement of God-talk must be done even if you don’t feel like it. Affirmations are action based not emotion driven.”
Excerpted from Turning Your Down into Up by Gregory L. Jantz, PhD
Daily Reflection: When was the last time you thanked God [ … ]
Joining God in His Story
Genuine expressions of your love for Christ are often quite small, simple even.
Join the girl no one ever sits with at lunch.
Baby-sit for a single mom.
Take a meal to a sick family.
Rake the leaves in the yard of the grouchy old man next door.
Take a walk with the little girl down the street whose parents are never home.
Clean the house of a family in which the financially struggling parents are both working two jobs and never have time to catch up.
Sit on the street with a homeless person, and listen to her story.
Your opportunities to work alongside God will be revealed through your friendship with Him. He will invite you into His story in ways that uniquely fit youbut [ … ]
Bad to the Bone
“Badnessin other words, sindoesn’t have to be that dramatic. It can be something on the sidelines: an unkind word, a whisper of gossip, a neglected request, an unrepentant attitude, an intentionally forgotten event.
Ouch.
It all boils down to a heart that’s hardened against Godhowever temporary the condition, however isolated the tough spot
Here’s the good news: He loves us anyway.”
Excerpted from Bad Girls of the Bible by Liz Curtis Higgs
Daily Reflection: How do you know God loves you in the midst of your “badness?"
Becoming like Him
“So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled. Do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ Among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality. (1 Corinthians 10:12; 1 Peter 1:13-16; Ephesians 5:3)
Paul understood our very human tendency to live in denial, closing our eyes to the things in our lives that may need to change. Change is hard work, and we would rather stay as we are. But this is not how God has called us to live. He wants to help us control our minds and our desires so [ … ]
Ordinarys Dream
“Not long ago and not far away, a Nobody named Ordinary lived in the Land of Familiar.
Every day was pretty much the same for Ordinary. In the mornings he got up and went to his Usual Job. After work, he ate almost the same dinner he’d eaten the evening before. Then he sat in his recliner and watched the box that mesmerized most Nobodies on most nights
Time passed. Then one morning Ordinary woke up with these words echoing in his mind: What you’re missing, you already have
Could it be? Ordinary looked and looked. And then he discovered that in a small corner of his heart lay a Big Dream. The Big Dream told him that he, a Nobody, was made to be a Somebody and destined to achieve Great Things
Then he had a surprising idea. Could [ … ]