As parents, we know all too well the pressures of simply getting out the door on Sunday mornings with kids in tow. Along with that comes the added pressure of checking our children into their classes, making sure teachers know about a child’s allergies, or calming a tearful toddler.

When it comes down to it, welcoming new people isn’t always on our radar. And sometimes, the bigger problem is that we think our church is already so welcoming that it won’t make a difference if we fail to greet a guest.

Hard is hard, period. “We are not competing in the ‘Suffering Olympics,’” seminary professor, author, and mother to a special needs child, Dr. Sandra Glahn, often remarks. What she means is that in terms of trials, hardship, and heartache, we are not in a competition attempting to win the medal of “Life’s Worst Circumstance.” 

Abiding in Christ involves more than trusting him for salvation; it includes living intimately attuned to his presence within me. By his Spirit, Christ and I are one. My eyes are now our eyes; my mouth is now ours; my hands, my feet are ours. Though he lives in heaven, Jesus continues the ministry he began two thousand years ago. Through me, Jesus continues reconciling people with the Father. It’s a noble endeavor, but an arduous one – one that hurls me headlong into awkwardness and scrutiny. Obedience to the indwelling Christ makes me a living paradox.

Reading the Sermon on the Mount and hearing Kent M. Keith’s “Paradoxical Commandments” in my ear, I understand more of the paradoxical nature of abiding in Christ. 

Don’t discount the mundane, the 24/7. It may be the very place God is going to meet you. You may feel imprisoned by the ordinary in your life but He wants to empower you to look beyond and see His presence in all things.

Years ago I encountered a word of wisdom: "At the end of our lives, what we will regret is far more about what we didn't do, than what we did." And then recently, in a conversation about what "youngers" want to learn from "olders," a colleague said he wanted to know what we regret so he can learn from our lessons the wiser way (observation) instead of the hard way (personal experience).

I laid on the post-op bed after an emergency c-section. A guy in a doctor's gown stood at the end of my bed and told me something about my baby struggling to breathe and needing to transfer him to another hospital. They’d let me know more when they could.

I laid there unable to move from anesthesia, powerless, with a barren womb and empty arms.

God? Why? I trusted You.

We have all heard the saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” but most of us don’t really live like we believe it. There are so many areas of our life where we try to live life without any consequence. That is after all the implication. If you eat the cake now, the end consequence is that you won’t have it later. Could there be an area of greater need to believe this truth than the area of our imaginations? I think not.

So why is the Holy Spirit symbolized as a Dove in the Bible? I am glad you asked!

Topical Index of Hal's Blogs

“It’s all gonna burn!” Many times I heard this exclamation in my early days as a Christian. Those who said it to me intended it as an interpretation of Jesus’s exhortation to avoid laying up treasures on earth, where things get stolen and destroyed (Matt 6:19). I imagine 2 Peter 3:10 also had some influence on such thinking about earth: “But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and the very elements themselves will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be found to deserve judgment” (NLT).

Jeffrey Dahmer was arguably one of the most heinous serial killers of our time; he mercilessly drugged, strangled and raped, dismembered and cannibalized at least 17 men. When convicted in 1991, no punishment seemed befitting regarding the magnitude of his deplorable crimes.  Nevertheless, he was sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment. However, yesterday, I found out that this vile creature was dipped in the cleansing water of God's Grace as he was believed to have put his faith in Jesus Christ. He was baptized by Roy Ratcliff in 1994 and upon hearing this news, my knee-jerk reaction was stomach turning.  A beast of a man, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, deserved nothing but destruction yet the Holy Spirit reminded me that God's Grace abounds.  Just shortly before his baptism Dahmer allegedly asked  the question that any sinner marred by guilt and grief would utter, "Is heaven for me too?"