Father, thank you for the salvation You offer and that no one, including me is beyond the reach of Your mercy, grace and transforming power. Help me share my story with others so that people can see Your love.
Circumstances are what deceive us- you must be discerning in them. We embrace evil before good. We desire the opposite of what we once desired. Our prayers are at war with our prayers, our plans with our plans.
——Seneca, Moral Letters, 45.6(resource) Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom
[Deuteronomy 8-10 New International Version (NIV)]
8 Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors.2 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years.5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
Conversion, however, did not temper John's high dudgeon against the world. He gained some friends among fellow patients, but a lifetime of rejection and mistreatment had permanently embittered against him against all nonpatients. One day, almost defiantly, he asked me what would happen if he visited the local Tamil church in Vellore.
Belonging
From In His Image, Paul Brand and Philip Yancey (Stories for the Heart)
4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.7 And the peace of God,which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
I was asked to be a counselor in a junior high camp. Everybody ought to be a counselor in a junior high camp- just once. A junior high kid's concept of a good time is picking on people. And in this particular case, at this particular camp, there was a little boy who was suffering from cerebral palsy. His name was Billy. And they picked on him.
