Leader : Let us go before our God, confessing the ways we have dismissed His plan for internal peace from our lives. Leader : Heavenly Father, we crave rest and seek it everywhere but with You...
As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. ...
As a stranger walked down a quiet residential street, he noticed a man struggling with a washing machine at the doorway of his house. The homeowner was clearly having a hard time, so the passerby, wan...
Many of life’s annoyances just have to be ignored. That doesn’t mean that we suppress, ignore, or deny every pain. Serious pain has to be confronted. But one mark of resilience is learning to tell whi...
In his book, Running Scared, Pychologist Edward Welch illustrates how the fear of an event is often worse than the event itself. To demonstrate this, he provides two examples of people whose lives are...
Philippians 1:6, Romans 5:3-5, Jeremiah 29:11, 2 Peter 3:18, James 1:2-4, Psalm 121:1-2
It’s part of the life cycle of every living thing to grow and mature. It’s also natural for us to hope that we will be better people today than we were yesterday and that the things that trouble us at...
Philippians 2:3-4, 1 Peter 3:8, Colossians 3:12, Romans 14:12
Paradoxically, if we wish to become more aware of others and their concerns, there is perhaps no better work we can do than developing self-awareness. Consider the findings of a team of psychologists ...
Dan B. Allender, in his book Leading Character, tells the story of a friend whose daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. He kept news of his daughter’s illness to himself, fearing that his employees wo...
On a daily basis we’re faced with two simple choices. We can either listen to ourselves and our constantly changing feelings about our circumstances, or we can talk to ourselves about the unchanging t...
Matthew 5:7, Philippians 2:1-2, James 3:17, Proverbs 17:9, Luke 6:36, 1 Peter 3:8
I love the following story because it illustrates both our natural defensiveness when we are attacked and the potential for transformation. As the illustration demonstrates, this is only possible when...
There was a time when adults were neatly categorized into one of two groups: you were either neurotic or psychotic. Psychotic meant that you were out of touch with reality and afraid; neurotic meant t...
John 20:19-31, Matthew 6:25-27, Philippians 4:6-7, 1 Peter 5:7, Isaiah 41:10, Psalm 34:4
Fear is an emotion that produces worry. Here is a story from a friend: When I was a teenager, I worried about everything – grades, friends, what college I would attend. My mother confronted me and ...
Change invariably leads to loss, loss to grief, grief to anxiety and, finally, anxiety to hostility. We need therefore, to acknowledge grief. We need to understand and choose to walk with the grieving...
James 1:9, Philippians 2:3-4, Proverbs 3:18, Romans 12:15, James 1:19
Have you ever been guilty of being a “conversational topper”? The topper is someone who, when another confides a challenge or shares an exciting event, immediately connects that event to their own li...
I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...
Robert Wuthnow told a story about a man named Jack Casey, who worked as a member of an ambulance rescue squad. When he was a child, Jack had oral surgery - five teeth pulled. The little guy was terrif...
Matthew 6:34, Proverbs 12:25, Psalm 34:17-18, Philippians 4:6-7, Isaiah 40:29-31
I have often heard anxiety described as a big beach ball that you try to push under the water. Do you remember playing that game as a child? Keep that beach ball under the water as long as you can! Yo...
The comedian Richard Pryor, who was critically injured in a severe accident, once shared on Johnny Carson’s show that when faced with life-threatening situations, worldly concerns lose their significa...
Comparison is the root of most of the misery we feel in life. Comparison makes it impossible to view ourselves from any sort of godly perspective. It is an absolute snare for the soul. Consider what c...
Will the Real Jesus, Please Stand Up? Quite a few years have passed since I sat through a systematic theology class and had the professor pitch a variety of difficult to hit balls at us regarding the...
1 Peter 3:15, Philippians 4:6-7, Romans 15:13, James 1:2-3, 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
It is no stretch to say that the Lord may orchestrate amazingly challenging circumstances for you and your family for the primary purpose of giving your supernatural hope and Christian contentment a p...
In his highly book, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding balance, even as life seems to pull us in different directions: Overextending yourself is stretching your physic...
A climber recently had to be airlifted off Japan’s Mount Fuji due to altitude sickness. That alone would have been a dramatic enough story. But four days later—still recovering—he climbed back up ...
Recovery is not a process we can will, but consists of experiencing many small deaths, the passing of significant anniversaries, until our identity is solid and natural in the pronoun “I.”
In a study conducted by Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, researchers discovered what most of us already know: people do not like to be left alone with their own tho...