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Up and ahead

              Sometimes we are blindsided by a sudden shift in life. We thought we were on stable ground, and then someone starts shouting at us in a routine meeting, or tells us we don’t have a job anymore on a Monday morning, or a loved one leaves on Friday evening with no plans to return. We are left with broken piece of something that once made a kind of sense to us. We knew, and now we do not know.             Where is God? We can’t see Him anymore. We cannot understand where He went to, or what he was thinking. We trusted Him, didn’t we? Now look where we are… It is the better part of wisdom to be quiet when these calamities come to visit and to wait. It is the one wise thing Job’s friend did, when first they saw the plight of the miserable man, they only wept with him.             When later they decided to try and explain things, it did not help Job at all. What could they tell him? They didn’t have answers. And a lot of times we do not have answers either. We are too sca

Doing onto others

  “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12 ESV             Actions flow out of attitudes. Behaviors are shaped by beliefs. Therefore, we shall not succeed in doing unto others, till have come to think of others rightly. If we think of them poorly, we shall render only poor service to them. If we do not respect people, we will not do well by them. At best we give them less than they are worthy of, and at worst we patronize them. Where is our motivation to serve those, we do not respect? We cannot be doing unto them because they are worthy of it, we do not believe that. So, we are doing it for own sake, to be obedient, or to signal our virtue, or to silence the nagging sense that there is something wrong with our perspective.             I want to focus our discussion on how we treat people at work, the kinds of people who we encounter regularly as they work. We have a great opportunity to minister to the

The folly of, "what if?"

              As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. John 9:1 ESV             Here we find a man born blind, sitting beside the way, with nothing much to do. And we are given to understand this had been the occupation of his life, sitting and begging. We can imagine he had a lot of time to think. And what do we suppose he was thinking about? What do we find ourselves thinking about when life leaves us sitting beside the way with time to think? Do we ponder how we got there? Do we perhaps wonder if there might have been some other way we could’ve gone? Do we wonder, perhaps where else we might have ended up? Do we not find ourselves moving from practical questions, into those alluring questions of what if? There are few questions which hold the captivating power of, “what if?” The question immediately removes the constraints of what is which often seem to hold us in less favorable positions. We are free to believe that which is not evident, not apparent; but desperately w