What a wondrous time… when in a matter of days winter’s chill …
Gives way to the life and hope of spring. [click to continue…]
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Past
A cathedral in Europe was famous for the large, magnificent, stained‑glass window that was located behind the altar and high above the sanctuary. One day a violent windstorm shattered that beautiful window into a thousand pieces. The church custodian was hesitant to discard the fragments, so he put them in a box and stored them in the basement of the cathedral.
Shortly after the storm, a man who had heard about the damage asked for and received the broken pieces of glass. About 2 years later, he invited the caretaker to visit him in a nearby village. When the custodian arrived, the man explained that he was an artisan and that he had something to show him. When the craftsman unveiled his work, the visitor was astonished to see a lovely window fashioned from the broken fragments. It was even more beautiful than the original.
You can be, too.
Like the shattered window, sometimes we live in the wake of a painful experience that threatens to leave us broken and scarred – an unrecognizable leftover of what we once imagined ourselves to be.
Abundance? Hardly.
Joyful? Are you kidding?
I heard a beautiful reflection on that a couple of years ago from a TV show, of all things: [click to continue…]
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Somebody in Florida was pretty up-tight. Back in the day The Florida Baptist Witness ran an article about a book titled, Making Peace With Your Past: Help for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families. The book was written by a pastor, Tim Sledge, who grew up in a dysfunctional family. This pastor realized that events in his childhood still produced a great deal of trauma and difficulty in his present life. The book tells what he learned in his journey toward wholeness and offers a biblical approach for others who deal with the same sort of thing.
One week later, enter one angry letter-writer. How could the Witness even think of highlighting a book that relies on psychology rather than on the Word of God? How could the writer not see that psychology and Christianity are based on two totally different suppositions? The Biblical answer to our past is just to forget it, like God does.
Alrighty then. How’s that working out for you?
Think about it. Is it unscriptural for hurting people to try to get a grip on their past? Is there any such thing as Christian (def. – “under the lordship of Jesus Christ) psychology (def. – “the study of human behavior”)? Is there something spiritually wrong with me, or with you, if we can’t “just forget it, like God does?”
Maybe my Florida friend should take a lesson from the hurricanes that routinely blow through that state. In a matter of hours, those deadly storms can destroy lives, property, and a lot of dreams. No one there escapes the fury.
But then an interesting thing happens. [click to continue…]
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