Analysis

“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”

A smooth sea never gave a skilled sailor, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that without hardship, challenges and even failures, we cannot become our best selves.

Eye-catching banners on high-traffic websites, marketing campaigns, genuine or illusory discounts, deals that vanish in seconds. Shopping lists, fierce price hunts, early morning alarms. Jumping the gun, millions in sales, ecstatic or dissatisfied customers, delayed deliveries, and blown budgets. In a word: Black Friday.

Thousands of street names changed because they referred to Christian saints, Catholic priests forced to marry, Jesus Christ described as a revolutionary—these are some of the stupefying details of the French Revolution.

“If you had asked me that morning, ‘Arianna, how are you?’ I would’ve said, ‘Fine.’ It was really the fact that being depleted, running on empty, had become the new normal for me.”

On February 27, 2022, I exchanged my pastor’s suit and tie for an ADRA volunteer vest at the Siret Customs point on the Romanian border.

Pliny the Elder wrote, in Naturalis Historia, a well-known adage: "Among [mortals] the only certainty there is is that nothing is certain."[1] Few know that Pliny made this statement in a chapter on the gods.

In Europe, one in twenty people suffer from depression, and one in four will experience depression during their lifetime. In the United States, major depressive disorder affects about five percent of the population.

After 25 years in the ministry, during which he never once considered leaving, Pastor Tim Kuperus admits that the last three years have been difficult enough for him to consider a different path.

Much has been written about the end of the world, but, if this end coincides with Christ’s second coming, then we should enquire from Jesus Himself what he teaches about His return. We will do this by using the material of the Christian Gospels.

Louis Braille said: "God was pleased to hold before my eyes the dazzling splendours of eternal hope. After that, doesn't it seem that nothing could keep me bound to the earth?"

Our reality isn’t always a calm place. Feelings of safety and peace that are so necessary for our well-being often elude us. What is happening today on a global level only goes to show how fragile our world is, and how easily we can lose control over the things we thought we had mastered.

Salvation is not a concept Christianity discovered. In a broad sense, salvation means rescue from any danger or adverse situation.

“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” — Ayn Rand

When I was in my mid-twenties, I attended a university in Brisbane, Australia, two hours from where I lived. I had a friend in the city who I’d sometimes stay with to avoid having to travel back and forth on back-to-back uni days.