Faith

One night while checking on his patients in a palliative care centre, the therapist risked asking a confusing question to a person whose universe had shrunk to the size of his sickbed: “What brought you joy today?” The answer was immediate: “Being alive.”

In cell number 8 of the prison in Pyongyang, a few frozen and emaciated prisoners had to endure an additional torture: the pungent smell and wild screams of an untamed creature.

Have you ever seen the early morning worship programs on television? The packed congregations, the huge church venues, the smooth-talking evangelist who delivers the perfect sermon . . . Church seems to be where the action is. That there are so many new mega-churches popping up all over the world suggests that a lot of people are desperate for spiritual guidance and fellowship....

Behind a successful career, John Baxter's life was falling apart.

It’s hard to read the description of Jesus’ life in the Gospels and not wonder what the many supernatural healings and other miracles performed by Him mean for us today.

In a psalm that is worth reading on our coldest mornings and in our darkest nights, King David asked some rhetorical questions—“Whom shall I fear? Of whom shall I be afraid?”— questions which our contemporaries would not dare to answer.

Life is a stage that we enter without a script, although we are constantly influenced by forces of varying visibility: social, educational, religious, economic, and political.

Norma Nashed has been running the Restore a Child organisation for more than two decades, helping 4,000 children in ten African countries.

Soviet soldier Bakhretdin Khakimov was declared missing in action during the war in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of 15,000 USSR soldiers and more than a million Afghans. Thirty-three years later, his family found out he was alive, living as a true Afghan among his former enemies.

"Hi, Alina! I hope you had a productive weekend" was the opening line of an email that, to me, encapsulated a whole misguided philosophy of life.

The words God is not listening! He is not answering! are the essence of one of our most troubling complaints. Is there an answer to it powerful enough to pull us from doubt’s darkness?

This year marks the 58th anniversary of Time magazine's controversial cover question: Is God Dead?

“God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours—so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things.”[1](Corrie ten Boom)

Contrary to one's initial impression, vigilance is not the main theme of Jesus' parables of "absence and expectation." Absence is central to these stories, because it is absence which enriches them, rather than impoverishing them. Absence is not a shortage, a gap, or a sign of non-existence—it is a catalyst.

As we know all too well, life can be hard. Even in the best of times, life can be hard. But now this, a pandemic? How are we to cope?