Tag Archives: doubt

I can’t fix it…and that is precisely the point

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My heart and mind have been ruminating all day about hope, faith, doubt, Jesus, God, despair, pain, disappointments, trust, and truth.  I’m a little weary inside tonight.

Already having a mini faith crisis of sorts lately, pondering truth and what I really, truly believe about God, Jesus, eternity and life and…when I try to solve these issues on my own I just find myself walking in circles, getting nowhere and feeling restless.

With all this filling my heart already, today I reached a tipping point.  A dear friend who has so much pressure in her life already shared some details with me of the latest tough news and troubling lack of answers and hopeful outcomes.  As I listened I felt so inept, incapable of helping her.  I was thinking I should say something about Jesus but we were at work at the front desk and it wasn’t the right time.  And for some reason I felt it would come across as ineffective or cliché, like offering to put a little Band-aid on a gaping wound, or bailing out a sinking boat with a teaspoon.

Then I felt guilty for feeling that way.  Maybe I hesitated, too, because I wasn’t confident at the moment of that hope myself.  Why was my heart hesitating? Continue reading →

Living the dream?

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He’s one of my favorite Bible characters, probably second only to Jesus.  He persevered through lots of unfair treatment, imprisonment, hatred, and years of waiting and kept giving 100% and because of that people noticed.  They could see that God was with Him.  God never left Him and used all of those things, the entire timeline up to a certain point, to bring him to a place of purpose, a place from which he could save all of Israel, including his very own family.  Joseph’s story is well-known but is one I can learn from over and over again.  This morning, John preached about how God used even the opposition Joseph faced from his own flesh and blood brothers to help propel him down the to road to realizing his dreams.  They were God-given dreams and they would be God-caused, God-created, God-completed.  Joseph just had to stay faithful and keep believing.

Sometimes we let the negative things people say or their opposing attitudes and actions give us doubt about our God-given dreams.  Sometimes we even give up on a dream when it seems nothing is happening, it seems maybe we thought it up or imagined it, when it seems too big to really ever materialize….if we’re being logical.  Continue reading →

Really?

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One of my pet peeves is when people forward an emotional story or prayer request, or sensational news story that gets people all riled up and isn’t even true.  It seems we, the human race, are pretty quick to believe what other people say.  Either that or we’re too lazy or careless to find out if it’s true before spreading it around to others.

I’ve had emphatic pleas from friends who read that if you forward this email to 100 people such and such famous company will send you a check for lots of money, using some email tracking program that doesn’t even exist!  I’ve received prayer requests that are no longer valid – either the person was healed, found, or the situation remedied and the request just keeps circulating and circulating.   The fabricated stories about faith are the ones that frost me the most.  I once read an email story about Billy Graham evangelizing with the entire crowd from one of his rallies in New Orleans, many being saved, only to find out that someone made it up.  It never happened.   Continue reading →