If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Or you can select your feed type by clicking on the "Subscribe" button on the right. Thanks for visiting!
You wouldn’t have known from meeting Martha the first time that her life had been a sinking ship. Rewind from the near-poverty this single mother of two sons lived to the day she walked away from her “covering” – an abusive, controlling religious system. Go back a bit further to the time her minister husband left her for another woman. If you dare, rewind a bit more to the night she and her husband came home to find their third son, Matthew, dead in his crib from SIDS.
Life had not been kind. But you wouldn’t know it from the courageous smile, the ox-like willingness to work, and the radiant joy she had in her relationship with Jesus Christ. Sure, Martha had her moments, and could cry with the worst of ‘em. But a heart so captured by the grace of God will cling to it, even when everything else seems lost.
I once asked her why she didn’t just walk away, since loving and serving God had been so costly. I don’t remember any words – just the look on her face that let me know I had just asked the most absurd question possible.
A heart once captured will never let go. [click to continue…]
“Sure I may be tuckered, and I may give out, but I won’t give IN!” (Molly Brown, from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”)
We spend a lot of time thinking about sinking.
In the mental and spiritual circles I travel in, we focus a lot on discouragement, sadness, grief and such. The most-read article I have written this year is titled, “The Sinking Soul.”
And for good reason. We live in a broken world. Jesus came to heal the brokenhearted. A significant part of the New Testament was written to people who face severe, mind-numbing hostility and pain. And left to our own devices, the devil has sinking souls for breakfast.
But maybe it’s time for a different look. [click to continue…]
When you’re wounded in the battle, knocked down and winded, get up.
When you’re shamed and blamed, defenseless and without excuses, get up.
When your “friends” abandon you in the darkness or point out the obvious by accusing you in the light, get up.
When the enemy comes in like a flood to kick you when you’re down or to rejoice over your wounds, get up.
When the easiest thing in the world to do is just to lie there and bleed, get up!
“A righteous man will fall seven times.” But he will rise again. Get up!
Get up!
You wouldn’t have known from meeting Martha the first time that her life had been a sinking ship. Rewind from the near-poverty this single mother of two sons lived to the day she walked away from her “covering” – an abusive, controlling religious system. Go back a bit further to the time her minister husband left her for another woman. If you dare, rewind a bit more to the night she and her husband came home to find their third son, Matthew, dead in his crib from SIDS.
