Category Archives: Christian Living

Influencers

Violet’s post on Tuesday at Other Food: daily devo’s ended with an idea I’m still thinking about:

Spend some time today, thinking about and thanking God for the people who helped birth you into God’s forever family. (You can read the whole devotional, “The begets,” here.)

I was blessed with a grandmother who prayed for us daily, and I’m also thanking God today for formative touches through two Sunday School teachers and a musician who doesn’t know I exist. When I get thinking about it further, the list gets too long to enumerate.

Who are some of the people who’ve influenced you for the Kingdom? People God shone through to draw you to Himself, or to help you grow?

Father, thank You for each person who allowed Your Spirit to shine into my life through their obedience, whether they knew it or not. Bless them today, with heaped-up, running-over blessings in their spirits.

Scurry Syndrome

My friend Belinda at Whatever He Says posted something the other day that keeps coming back to my mind:

I recognized that paradoxically, I was multi-tasking during my “quiet time.” There was no rush to do any of these things, nor any good reason to do more than one thing at a time. I decided to stop and savour each thing individually instead of trying to do so many things at once. (click the quotation to read the full post.)

Especially at this time of year it’s easy to slip into scurry mode, rushing, hurrying, trying to keep track of three or four things at once.

Somehow God slowed me down this Advent season, and I’ve been enjoying such a sense of peace. A couple of times this week, wisps of “hurry” stirred within me and I realized what had been missing in the peace: anxiety. No thank you, I do not want it back. I’ve been consciously stopping to pray and remind myself that everything is in God’s hands and not mine.

Let’s have a conversation: How do you keep the scurry syndrome from ruling your life?

Keeping Focused

As Margaret from the Hallelujah blog pointed out in last week’s “Friday conversation,” there’s plenty of commercialization and other pressures that threaten to distract us from the true meaning of Christmas: Jesus’ birth.

What do you do to intentionally keep focused on Christ in the days leading up to Christmas?

For me, faith-centred Christmas music helps.

God With Us–All the Time

If the psalmist is right—that there truly is nowhere we can go to flee God’s presence—why do we act like his attendance is intermittent? And why do we assume it’s dependent on us?

This is the question Canadian singer/songwriter/writer Carolyn Arends asks in her latest column, “Come Lord Jesus,” in Christianity Today. Click either of the preceding links to read the full column and to see how baseball can teach a spiritual lesson.

Thank you to Ginny Jaques at Something About the Joy for pointing me to this article. Carolyn’s writing is always worth reading.

“Wondering Imaginitively”

Over at the Something About the Joy blog, Canadian writer and teacher Ginny Jaques has a great post about “wondering imaginitively”:

What if imagination is actually a gift from God, designed to allow us to “see” the unseen. To “see” Him? What if we were designed to use our imaginations to picture and better understand (and more readily believe in) unseen realities?

Click here to read the rest of Ginny’s post, “Godly Imagination”.

God’s Promises

Over at the Leading Women in Fearless Faith blog, Grace Fox writes:

God’s Word is filled with amazing promises He’s made to those who follow Him. Psalm 57 contains three of them:

* God will fulfill His purpose for us (v. 2). Whatever His specific purpose for our lives is, He takes responsibility for ensuring that it happens. We only need to say yes to whatever He asks, and He looks after the rest.

To read the other two promises in this Psalm, and Grace’s examples of how they’ve been proved true in her life, visit Leading Women in Fearless Faith.