Faith

Many people know the Lord’s Prayer, having learned it from a parent or grandparent. But few know that it was given as a response to the disciples’ request for Jesus to teach them how to pray.

“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20).

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

A group of atheists in Sacramento, California, have prepared 55 billboards for the Christmas season, featuring images of local people and slogans such as "Good without God", "Doing good is my religion" or "Believe in yourself".

How did I begin to believe in You?

"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?

I was talking to the man I call Professor and I asked him, "I know you had reservations about getting baptised. Why did you decide to do it anyway? What was the deciding factor?"

Andrew McChesney knew what he wanted—to be a famous journalist. He thought Moscow would be a good place to learn his craft and make a name for himself, which he did. But his years in Russia shaped his life in a much deeper way—it was there that he discovered God and found new meaning in life.

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.

I believe that doubt is a part of faith, not its opposite. It took me quite a few years to say this without feeling guilty. I needed to have many experiences before I could accept that questions are legitimate and not a sign of spiritual decay.

All COVID-19 statistics lead to the same conclusion: the young ones, our children, are at the lowest risk of getting ill or dying from the virus. That’s comforting. But the pandemic does pose a certain danger to them.

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

When I was four years old, my younger brother was born. My parents focused on my brother and spent less time with me. It was only 40 years later that I discovered how this had affected me.

“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)

Anecdotally, they say that fear of public speaking is the biggest fear of mankind, after fear of death. Everyone smiles at this order of priorities, but no one disputes or discusses the fear at the top of the ranking.