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It’s the time of the year when, for many of us, excesses don’t seem to matter too much—fruit mince pies, chcolate truffles and more cake than the number of baubles on your Christmas tree!

Bruce Reichenbach's book, Divine Providence: God’s Love and Human Freedom is impressive first of all due to the author’s total disinterest in impressing his readers. Instead, he has a legacy to pass on.

I just got back from the funeral of a fifty-four-year-old mother who left behind a grieving teenager. His father told how the boy wanted to ask his mother for forgiveness, on her deathbed, for all the stubbornness typical of a seventeen-year-old. He was already forgiven.

A major crisis pushes us to re-evaluate the way we see and do things in the fields of health, finance, and social interaction. But how does this crisis affect our religious practices—especially the most common of these, prayer?

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. – John 14:27

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, […] who correctly handles the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15)

In a society that is more concerned with form than substance, character ranks second. It is the power of the image that dictates things.

Seventh-day Adventists have the deep conviction that Jesus Christ will soon return, and the desire to keep His commandments as they were originally written in the Decalogue.

“The Christ of Nicea is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant apocalyptic preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee, who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously crucified for crimes against the state. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had now become fully God.”

I was in the park with my little girl when a heavy summer shower began, driving us home. My little girl wanted us to stop for a moment in the stairwell of our apartment building to watch the rain. After standing there for a few seconds, I heard her whisper, "God, You're getting soaked."

Whether we see ourselves or not as living collections of our habits, we know from experience that, once formed, our habits are not as malleable as we would like them to be.

Although we may not like everyone, we want everyone to like and accept us. We raise our eyebrows suspiciously if someone treats us with indifference or, worse, with hostility. We feel misunderstood and rejected. And the feeling of rejection is as intense as physical pain.

The first few seconds are confusing, voices and blurred figures buzzing nearby, and it seems to me that some clumsy hands are trying to pull me out of this zigzag between sleep and wakefulness. I clearly hear a woman's voice announcing that I'm waking up and, before I'm completely out of this state of drowsiness, I realise I'm in intensive care.

Courage is not the opposite of fear, nor of caution. True courage is what you do right in the midst of fear.

Among the greatest disappointments of life is having our expectations unfulfilled; not by politicians, or publications that promote false news or weather forecasts, but by those close to us—people in whom we have invested our confidence.