This girl that I know and her boyfriend broke up recently.

lifeofpraise:

I saw her relationship status changed to single and was really shocked because everyone knew they were going to get married. They were as perfect of a couple as you could get. If you thought of one, you automatically thought of the other. I checked back today to see if she had said anything about it, and saw that her ex-boyfriend had posted this.

“(Girl’s name) has been the greatest girlfriend that I could ever ask for. She is beautiful and everything that I could ask for, but we have noticed that our relationship was not bringing the glory to God that He deserves. We do love each other and have had a great relationship according to the world, but as followers of Jesus we are now strangers in the world, and we should live according to it. We will seek God to see if he wants to use us together in the work of his kingdom and if He does not want us together we will work to bring glory to God separately.”

 

“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind” – Ecclesiastes 1: 14

“Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, Or the golden bowl is broken, Or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well. Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” – Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

I’ve been listening to a Hilary Duff song, and although the lyrics are the usual bubblegum pop for the most part, in the chorus she’s got one thing right – it is only “one more mile to Jericho”. Thank God.

“What would the world look like, for instance, if the church spent as much time teaching our teenagers to love others with compassion, as we spend pounding the “no-sex-outside-of-marriage” message into their heads? What if we, as parents, spent more time guiding our children on the journey of discovering who God created them to be, and less time telling them what the Bible says they’re not supposed to do?

What would marriages look like if churches began honestly addressing the many, varied ways we sin against one another within marriage, rather than only focusing on those sins that take place outside of legal marriage?

Which ultimately leads me to wonder this: What did/does Jesus want most for us? To be compassionate and merciful? To forgive freely? To love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love God?  And if we focused more on those things, would everything else—healthy, fulfilling sex and relationships included—fall more organically into place, as God intended?”

-”Why the Case for Early Marriage Worries Me”

Love this perspective, especially the point about addressing the sins within marriage – I’m a 20-something who has attended church regularly for as long as I can remember, and I can’t remember ever hearing a sermon on the topic of marriage. What to look for a in a husband, how to prepare to be a good spouse, how to stay pure, etc – heard lots of those messages, but my mind is crying out for more information on marriage itself, because I feel like I have such an unclear, imperfect picture of it because it’s so rarely talked about in comparison to other issues. Maybe if the pulpit delved into marriage and gave a clearer picture of it they wouldn’t have to spend so much time telling young singles not to dive into it and to wait for the right person, because we (20-somethings that is) would have a more balanced view of it: less as a mecca where all your dreams come true, and more as on ongoing battle to maintain a relationship and a long series of sacrifices for the other person.

‘One of the oddest questions I get asked in interviews is: Is faith important to your politics? It’s like asking someone whether their health is important to them or their family. If you are someone ‘of faith,’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics,’ Blair said.  Blair told ITV1 that he had prayed while making his decision on committing British forces to Iraq. ‘In the end, there is a judgment about these things, and that judgment is made by other people, and if you believe in God, it’s made by God as well,’ he said.

‘Faith,’ said Blair, ‘is not something separate from our reason, but integral to it, giving the use of reason a purpose, and human beings a sense of the divine. This is the life purpose that cannot be found in constitutions or speeches. It is a purpose uniquely centred around kneeling before God.”"

-via Open the Word.org, original source the Los Angeles Times

J. Barrie Shepherd , in Christian Century

• Professor: You are a Christian, aren’t you, son?
• Student: Yes, sir.
• Professor: So, you believe in God?
• Student: Absolutely, sir.
• Professor: Is God good?
• Student: Sure.
• Professor: My brother died of cancer, even though he prayed to God to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But God didn’t. How is God good, then? Hmm?

• (Student was silent)
• Professor: You can’t answer, can you? Let’s start again, young fella. Is God good?
• Student: Yes.
• Professor: Is Satan good?
• Student: No.
• Professor: Where does Satan come from?
• Student: From.. God.
• Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil in this world?
• Student: Yes.
• Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it? And God did make everything. Correct?
• Student: Yes.
• Professor: So who created evil?
• (Student didn’t answer)
• Professor: Is there sickness? Immortality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in the world, don’t they?
• Student: Yes, sir.
• Professor: So, who created them?
• (Student had no answer)
• Professor: Science says you have 5 senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Tell me, son.. have you ever seen God?
• Student: No, sir.
• Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard your God.
• Student: No, sir.
• Professor: Have you ever felt your God, tasted your God, smelt your God? Have you ever had any sensory perception of God, for that matter?
• Student: No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.
• Professor: Yet you still believe in Him?
• Student: Yes.
• Professor: According to empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, Science says your God doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?
• Student: Nothing. I only have my Faith.
• Professor: Yes, Faith. And that is the problem Science has.
• Student: Professor, is there such a thing as Heat?
• Professor: Yes.
• Student: And is there such a thing as Cold?
• Professor: Yes.
• Student: No, sir, there isn’t.
• (The Lecture Theatre became very quiet with this turn of events)
• Student: Sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything called cold. We can hit 458 Degrees below Zero which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of Heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.
• (There was a pin-drop silence in the Lecture Theatre)
• Student: What about darkness, Professor? Is there such a thing as darkness?
• Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t darkness?
• Student: You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have Low Light, Normal Light, Bright Light, Flashing Light… But if you have No Light constantly, you have nothing and it’s called Darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If it is, You would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?
• Professor: So what is the point you are making, young man?
• Student: Sir, my point is, your Philosophical Premise is flawed.
• Professor: Flawed? Can you explain how?
• Student: Sir, you are working on the Premise of Duality. You argue there is Life and then there is Death, a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?
• Professor: If you are referring to the Natural Evolutionary Process, yes of course, I do.
• Student: Have you ever observed Evolution with your own eyes, sir?
• (The professor shook his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument was going)
• Student: Since no one has ever observed the Process of Evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you not a Scientist but a Preacher?
• (The class was in uproar)
• Student: Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the Professor’s brain?
• (The class broke out into laughter)
• Student: Is there anyone here who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelt it? .. No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical, Stable and Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures?
• (The room was silent. The Professor stared at the student, his face unfathomable)
• Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on Faith, son.
• Student: That is it, sir.. exactly! The link between man and God is Faith. That is all that keeps things alive and moving!
• That student was Albert Einstein.

“We don’t live in a coherent age. Walking through the culture is like walking through the surf after a battering storm, stepping through shards of insatiable consumerism, gaudy FunTime noise, self-indulgent weepiness, toilet humor, posturing nihilism. Things keep saying they?re important, but they turn out to be more loud than deep. Stepping around the shards of the shipwreck, we begin to wonder if anything might be important, anything might last or have meaning. Could bread mean a Body? Could wine mean Blood? Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?

It is that simple, and yet the simplicity we gratefully embrace is only the shadow of a reality blasting beyond the boundaries of our comprehension.”

- Frederica Mathewes-Green
At the Corner of East and Now

“As the days of pregnancy are quickly coming to a close, I had the brief thought today that I might miss a bit of this season in my life.  Not that I would want repetition of the nausea, vomiting, dietary restrictions, needle-pricking or this reality of a train running over my body — but I will miss waking up every morning with the constant, continual, everyday hopeful, expectant anticipation of a miracle.  That’s what this season has been like – I and everyone else around me are all looking to the future, eagerly expectant of something wonderful that’s going to happen.  Even strangers look at me with knowing smiles and sparkles in their eyes as we share in this universal feeling of Hope from the anticipation of new life.  Joy really springs from the Hope of something wonderful to come, doesn’t it?

I think this is what (should) make the gospel so enticing.  In the gospel, we are promised an inheritance beyond comparison and guaranteed a future full of good and wonderful things.  We have Hope like no other.  Therefore, we ought to wake up and live every single day with hopeful expectation of a miracle that is about to happen that very day.  As Frank Laubach wrote, wouldn’t it be glorious to live a year with the view in mind that you will say at the end of it,”This, this has been the finest year of my life” or to be able to look ahead and say, “The present year can and shall be better!”?  That is the hope he anticipated as he resolved to fill every minute of every day full of God.  Just because this season of my life is coming to an end, it doesn’t mean that my life has to slip back into some kind of dreary existence where there’s nothing to look forward to.  That would be false living.  With Christ, I really can keep on living with a constant, continual, everyday hopeful, expectant anticipation of a miracle. “