I have had times in my life where I have struggled to find time to think. When the busyness of all that must be accomplished, the tiredness that accompanies such doing, and the mental exhaustion that follows seems to suck away all possibility of thought, much less deep thought. And I find that the time that I spend with God is more hurried and as a consequence, he appears more distant.
Continue reading “The good that lies before us”When God speaks courage in the face of fear
Bravery and courage these are such weighty words. Indeed they are not terms I would use to describe myself. When I think of bravery, I think of knights in armour, clad for battle, unwavering before the storm that assails them. Courage seems to be the trait of those who wander far off lands in search of the lost, wounded and broken.
Continue reading “When God speaks courage in the face of fear”How to stand as the battle wages
We live in a physical, material world. A world that can be measured, seen, and observed. That we can experiment upon and understand. And that is all there is. Isn’t it?
However, such a notion is foreign to many, if not most, of the people who walk upon this earth. And for those who have done so for millennia. For these people, the spiritual and supernatural are as familiar as the air that we breathe. Life is not limited to the physical, rather the significance of the spiritual is understood and embraced.
But for most of us who live in the West, this is not so.
Continue reading “How to stand as the battle wages”Thoughts and reason, but what about the imagination?
Years ago I stumbled across a relatively unknown essay by A.W. Tozer, entitled, ‘The sanctified imagination’. It is well worth reading, though somewhat challenging to find, I managed to track it down again here. This idea caught my attention, it held me and welcomed me as a thought that was both foreign and yet somehow familiar.
In my neck of the woods, we seem to be cerebral people. We live in our intellect, we debate, argue, refine, argue some more, we like to think well and like others to think that we think well. And, other methods of thought and being are somehow relegated to places of less importance. Do we feel? Maybe, but we must never be driven by our emotions. Do we imagine? Perhaps, but let’s not get lost in flights of fancy.
Continue reading “Thoughts and reason, but what about the imagination?”Where do I begin?
It is so easy to pretend that we are something that we are not. We like to portray an image of who we are to others: to our friends, acquaintances, strangers, to God and even to ourselves. It is often so much easier to live a life of pretence than to face the reality of who we are and the circumstances that surround us. Obviously, our society encourages this by bombarding us with opportunities to escape – whether it be through movies, binge-watching tv series, unending opportunities to lose ourselves in books, gaming, or any other form of entertainment. And our online image can be so divorced from the reality of who we are that we can fool the world into thinking that we are someone other than ourselves.
Continue reading “Where do I begin?”