Death and Life

-

 Only Jesus can take a dead thing and make it alive.

Only the Living God can take a dead thing and make it alive.

Stop expecting people or things without that power to make you feel alive.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Summer in Kairos

-
Summer is now here. By the grace of God South Texas had a true spring in every sense of the word and as things are heating up and school is ending, we enter a time for this part of the country that approximates hiatus. We take a break from certain events and busy times to hopefully plan a vacation and rest in this season. For a youth worker it is tempting to resist rest in this season, because this brief respite from typical onslaught of school activities give ample opportunities to connect and support young people in ways not available to us Youth Workers during the school year. As I learned last year during lockdown those opportunities for mission trips and camps are not guaranteed. Making the most of those special moments is quite a large part of the job. I do not remember every youth group meeting I had as a young man, nor do I remember everything that I learned. I have several good impressions from those times, but camp changed me, mission trips changed me.  I started out high
Read more

Re-Dedication

-
     We are currently in the middle of Hanukkah 2020 and while this holiday always seemed to me as an exotic and odd form of Christmas growing up, and was seemingly only marked by those that had a dark house on Christmas save a menorah in the window sill. Hanukkah is the festival of lights that is a Holiday that was added to the feast of tables because of a very poignant story to the point that we find ourselves today. The miracle that spurred and found the celebration of Hanukkah as it exists today came at the end of the Maccabean Revolt. During the Maccabean Revolt the Jewish people successfully gained a short term freedom from the Seleucid Empire. They wished to rededicate their temple, which required Eight Days of worship and burning of lamps. They only had a days worth of oil in their lamps. God allowed for the lamps to burn all eight days despite the lack of oil. They had fought hard through a particularly difficult revolt and faced impossible odds and certainly knew that the fig
Read more

Leave Space

-
It occurs to me that one of my consistent mental exercises is the one where I try to take all the current changes in my life and extrapolate future events. I should say possible future events. This is a close cousin to rehearsing a conversation you are going to have repeatedly before the actual person you plan on talking to is involved. It is kind of like emotional planning. If I can think of all the worst possibilities then I can lessen the sting of surprise, I can better “handle” disappointment if I can expect it fist. I had a student once that was worried about visiting their parents. They spoke about the past of their relationship and just vented about how it all made them feel. While writing this I remember what I told her and am slightly embarrassed because I so often fail to keep my own counsel or heed my own advice. I told her to feel her feelings to pick them up and then put them down and to leave space for her parents to surprise her. Maybe it will all happen as you expec
Read more