Christian Living Archives

To Read the Bible it Feels Overwhelming

To read the Bible, it can feel overwhelming. What do I do? I want to read the Bible and grow, but where do I start I was raised in a church tradition that highly valued reading the Bible. People were encouraged to read their bible every day, go to […]

Faith & Mental Health

Is God Concerned With Your Happiness?

Life can have many traumatic events, but is God concerned about your happiness? Yes, and there is a quest happening. I’ve been doing a sailing course over the last month. Learning how a sailboat worked. I knew the physics, but I wanted to feel what it was like to be […]

Faith & Mental Health

Satan: The Perfect Narcissist

What does perfect narcissism look like? We can see it in the evil of Satan. I read a list the other day about the characteristics of those with narcistic personality disorder. Grandiose Sense of Self-Importance: They believe they are superior and special, deserving of exceptional treatment and recognition. Exploitative […]

Anxiety & Stress

Search me. Know my Anxious Thoughts.

There is a fear in all of us. It’s been there seemingly forever. The Psalmist sings ‘Search me, Know my Anxious Thoughts.’ Can God be that good? I was watching a TV program about border control in the U.S.A. The officers had a tip that someone coming through immigration was […]

Spiritual Practices

The Five Best Practices to Restore the Soul

The practices of your week and day may drain your life, but what practices restore your soul? ‘Oh, that’s so good for the soul’ Sometimes I hear people say that. Sometimes I say it myself. It’s that moment when you feel a restoring of something drained out of you. You […]

Uncategorized

A Simple First Place Prayer

Your pain is legitimate, and second-place prayers reveal the need, but first-place prayers must always come first, so we pray a simple prayer. Simple sounds easy. Requiring little effort. First place. It’s where we put the best, second-place things go behind first-place things. There is an order—first place, then […]

Faith & Mental Health

Three Ways God Answers Prayer

We want God to answer our prayer our way, but there is a larger story going on, so we wait to see the way God answers prayer. Most weekends, when my children were young, I made buns for lunch. First, I would make the bread dough in a breadmaker, then […]

Getting Well Staying Well Spiritual Formation

Can you Take in the Good and Let it Nourish?

So many good things go unnoticed, but when we learn to take in the good and let it nourish, then our whole direction of a life can change. My neighbors have some small children. Yesterday, while walking in the garden, one of the little boys ran up to me to […]

Uncategorized

How to Create New Rope Bridges in our Thinking

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Our thoughts can take us to both the best and worst of places, but we can create new thinking pathways. It will require a plan to rope bridge the synapse gap. It was a small rope bridge, and it had only three wires. One wire where you could place your […]

Mental health Mental Illnesses

Three Bible Verses to Reassure when You feel Stress

There are times we feel stress, but there is the hope of reassurance when we meditate on some Bible verses. One of my favorite bible characters was someone who seemed to need consistent reassurance when under stress. He was anxious, unsure, and seemed to want to argue with God. I […]