4 results for tag: Shannon
A Secure Future
It’s a strange thing to say that sorrow comes with a gift. And I hope that idea doesn’t come across as pithy or like something you’d see on one of those inspirational posters in a middle school counselor’s office or like one of those really bad sympathy cards with the pictures of clouds. But, when we experience grief in its many forms, it forces us to really think about what happens after death.
C.S. Lewis writes, “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
Whether heaven exists is no longer a theoretical question. Heaven isn’t just “the good place to ...
The Gift of Himself
There are lies about the hard things. I bet you’ve heard them. They use the language of Scripture to make them sound like holy things. But, oh, friend—they are lies and they come to deceive. They sound like this:
“If you are good enough, God will give you what you want.”
“If you claim the thing you want in prayer, and believe that you have already received it, God has no choice but to give it to you.”
“With enough faith, you can bring physical healing.”
“God will never give you more than you can handle.”
The lies sound like truth, and they sound good because it seems like everything is yours to control. But when devastation ...
Another Way
"I said to the LORD, 'You are my Lord; I have no good besides You.' As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight." Psalm 16:2-3
When you go through something hard, it strips away the fake. Have you noticed that? The harder the thing, the less tolerance I have for the frivolous. I want to get down to the essence of life, to spend time on the things that count. I think that’s where David is when he writes this Psalm.
I’ve wrestled with “Why?”—as if knowing the answer to that question would bring some kind of healing or closure. And people will try to answer that question for you with pithy statements ...
A New Name
I like the Psalms because they are honest. They’re joy and pain and longing and grief and anger and worship—all mixed up and raw, just like our hearts.
In college, I took a poetry class—I had been writing angsty poetry in a cool-looking journal since high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing. Turns out, I was pretty terrible. The problem was that my goal in writing was to “share” something kind of obscure and then spin it into something nice and happy. Because I thought that’s what Christians were supposed to be. Nice and happy. After getting paper after paper back with more red pen on it than my actual writing, I went in to see ...
