life. faithful.

I typically try to steer clear of controversial topics. Well, I guess that's probably not quite the right way to say that. I'm sure there are people who would say that a lot of the topics I write about are controversial--after all, it's a big controversy in the world today to say that Jesus is the only way to God. This post, though, is about something controversial within the Church. There are some matters of doctrine that are debated from congregation to congregation. Some of those are things I believe we can overlook. When it comes right down to it, some of those issues are minor talking points. They don't have any true, lasting effects on believers or the lost, so arguing about them doesn't do anything other than divide. Other issues, however, are worth talking about. Those are the ones that run the risk of causing confusion that can prove harmful. In my mind, the discussion surrounding the tribulation and the rapture is one of those. If you've heard of

"If...then" statements are important in computer languages, both in programming and in queries. When you see a conditional statement like this, you know that the second half of the statement will only happen if the first half does. There's no way around it--that's part of the beauty in math and logic for me. If you know the input and the function, you know the output. I guess that's why I'm oddly comforted by the fact that so many "if...then" statements are in the Scriptures. There are a lot of things I don't understand, so I like it when something is straight forward. Here's the strange contradiction, though--I can be comforted by the presence of these statements and still be brokenhearted over what some of them mean for us. Right now at church, we're working our way through Jeremiah. A few years back, we started making our way through the Bible chronologically. What was supposed to be a 1-year journey was stretched out the first ti

We hear it all the time-- "Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have." ~Oprah Winfrey “You know the truth by the way it feels.” ~Anonymous “Live authentically. Live your truth.” ~Neale Donald Walsch “Face your fears; Live your passions, be dedicated to your truth.” ~Billie Jean King “You don’t need to get anyone else to agree with your truth. You just need to live it.” ~Alan Cohen I could keep going, but honestly it's a little depressing to me. It seems like the whole world is telling us that there's only one thing that matters: each of us is supposed to be true to whatever we feel like is the truth for us. We see it in the media, we're bombarded with it by self-help gurus, and we're passing it on to our children in the message that our entire goal is to make sure they have happy lives. But here's another quote: " The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emoti

I've written about what I believe --we were challenged to do so many years ago at a church we had started attending. It was something I had never been challenged to do before, and I would encourage you to do the same. I've also written my testimony, probably more times than I can count (I grew up in a Baptist church, after all). It's been updated time and again, which should always be the case if you ask me because I should always be learning more about God and realizing what He has done for me (which is somewhere I very much fall short). Today, though, I realized that I've never sat down and thought about why I believe. Honestly, that's not a simple task. It seems like why is always the most complex question to answer. My first why comes from something most of us use as a basis for belief--it's what I've been taught, and the people I learned from were/are trustworthy. As Paul wrote to Timothy: "So surely you ought to stick to what you know is c