i thought i was finished with this series on people who have lost a child and then i received this email from a friend of mine who lost a baby. i knew this was one more to be shared and i imagine it will impact a lot of people deeply. i want to encourage those of you who read it to refrain from doing what we often do when hearing someone's story - justifying, rationalising, [...]
i imagine this is a much bigger post or discussion than what will fit in here but let's get it started... a soccer player [who was worth something like 40 million something - does it really matter when you hit 40 million whether the next word is pounds, euros or dollars?] scores a goal. a hundred facebook statuses [stati?] read something along the lines of 'amazing goal - so worth the money spent' i get [...]
Itʼs July, Mauri phones to tell me the news, weʼre pregnant again. Whoohoo! We had been trying and Mauri had had a dream in which a date for a birth of a baby was given. So the news was, well, wow perhaps God had spoken to us about the actual birthday! We did a calculation and due date was in the ʻdate proximityʼ. Sure it was very early days, but God had spoken hadnʼt he, [...]
more standing out passages and ideas from ‘Prayer: Does it make any difference?’ by Philip Yancey: 'David Ford, a professor at Cambridge, asked a Catholic priest the most common problem he encountered in twenty years of hearing confession. With no hesitation the priest replied, 'God.' Very few of the parishioners he meets in confession behave as if God is a God of love, forgiveness, gentleness and compassion. They see God as someone to cower before, [...]
some more quotes from ‘Prayer: Does it make any difference?’ by Philip Yancey, which you really should read: 'Be still and know that I am God': the Latin imperative for 'be still' is vacate. As Simon Tugwell explains, 'God invites us to take a holiday [vacation], to stop being God for a while, and let Him be God.' Too often we think of prayer as a serious chore, something that must be scheduled around other [...]
i have just started reading 'Prayer: Does it make any difference?' by Philip Yancey which was given to me by two great friends Emiel and Philippa a while back and which i just started reading at the right time... still early days but REALLY enjoying it and highly recommend it [and it is not 'the ten steps to really great prayer' at all] and while you should read the book, until you do, i thort [...]
we all know the much told story of the prodigal son, right? in fact, i even wrote a poem about it once, imagining the prodigal son had gone prodigal again [as one does] which you can take a look at here, but if you in fact don't know the story, you can look it up in Luke 15.11-32. and we all focus on the bad son and how we relate and the clever preachers tell [...]
we read this as part of morning prayer this morning: 'Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "Jesus Christ lived in the midst of His enemies. At the end, all of His disciples deserted Him. On the cross He was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause He had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but in the thick of [...]
so i have been going to gym, with my good friend from across the street, Coe aka Cobra [aka creator of the most powerful beast in the world - the Snuck - it's a snake, but it looks like a duck so you think it's all cute and innocent and go to stroke it, but watch out, it's a SNAKE!!!] [disclaimer: Coe has not actually created any Snucks as of yet so back of PETA, [...]
WAITING FOR A MIRACLE There's a glimpse of heartache and pain in 31-year-old Debbie lvin’s eyes, but just for a moment, and then it’s gone, swallowed up by a smile, a nervous chuckle as she launches into an account of her painful journey through infertility. It's a much greater problem than people think. It was only after I started talking openly about it, that I discovered that some of my friends and their friends were [...]