Faith

Why personalising Christianity could threaten your salvation.

In those times when grief accompanies us and we find ourselves alone in the middle of the night, does God shed tears with us?

What do you imagine heaven will be like? American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov famously said, “For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.” Although I love Jesus, I think I am a bit afraid of getting bored there too. There’s a prevailing picture of heaven as being some sort of suspended animation, which may play into this.

Divorce, widowhood, or celibacy are just a few of the faces of loneliness, an experience which Christians also deal with at some point. Those who have often crossed paths with it, say that loneliness is truly a flowering wilderness: a place that is isolated but where deep spiritual lessons are learned.

How can we protect ourselves against expecting too much of our friendships? Can we do something to prepare for the disappointment? And what does one do to deal with it?

Hendel Butoy was born in Brazil and raised in southern California. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, and was then offered a position as an animator at Walt Disney in 1979.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Trust is the main currency of the age in which we live, and people seem to be changing the directions they invest in faster than in the past. How is our life of faith influenced by how we relate generally to trust?

When you discover that the only thing you have left is faith in God, you fervently wish that your faith doesn't end up poisoning your soul.

Faith has brought me not only a sense of God's presence, but also evidence that He is answering our requests. Therefore, the other reasons that made me believe have become stronger.

Many times we don’t have the patience to wait for an answer to our prayers, and other times we don’t even know when we've received it. For the ten Boom family, the answer to some prayers came 100 years later.

"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 field of science was flourishing, and amid its youngest and brightest, one student in particular consistently topped physics and chemistry courses, took its academic prizes and was courted with offers of scholarships by prestigious universities. His trajectory was toward the heights of the scientific world.

Born into a family of surfers, one could say the love of the salty ocean air courses through the veins of his body. Named after legendary surfer Derek Ho, even his name embodies the hopes and expectations of what he was to become.

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.