Faith

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.

Jeddah is different, at least according to its city motto. This Saudi Arabian port city on the Red Sea is home to more than 4 million people and is a gateway to Mecca: the holiest city in Islam. Millions of pilgrims come through Jeddah to visit Mecca, some 65 kilometres to the east, and Medina, Islam’s second holiest city, 360km to the north.

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength,” says Corrie ten Boom, thus underlining a truth all Christians burdened by worry should remember.

"All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature" through the decisions you make, wrote CS Lewis. If the choices we make really have such an impact, how can Christians make sure they make the right decisions?

When prayers go unanswered, faith can turn to disbelief and hope to scepticism. On the other hand, God can intervene at unexpected moments, providing unexpected answers, as happened in Zechariah's life.

I have always imagined that well-being, bright prospects, good health and a clear purpose in life tend not to inspire questions about the meaning of life very often.

I had a ringing in my ears due to that unusual inner silence which I was paradoxically experiencing at the same time as a thought-storm that made me scream on the inside. 

I was a pagan as a child. Not by choice, but as a consequence of lacking any access to the Word of God. In the 1980s Romania, catechizing an Orthodox child (whose parents were members of the Communist Party) was a highly unlikely event Pavlik Morozov’s myth, the hero-child that denounced his own father, generated caution.

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.

I doubt there’s a person who hasn’t heard of the Boston Marathon bombing, which took the lives of three people. As runners entered the home straight, with the finish line in sight, first one then another explosion ripped through the happy, watching throng.

Whether we are cooking, repairing things, or solving life's problems, we are always learning from each other. However, when it comes to certain areas, including church life, the interchange of experiences is lacking. Communities often keep their ideas, and especially their mistakes, to themselves. Can we rediscover the deeply biblical nature of knowledge sharing?

When I was 20, my spiritual life felt like an exam where I had been given a topic I hadn’t prepared for.

You really don't realize what your thoughts about God are until you have nothing left but the conviction expressed in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: My Father, my friend from my youth (Jeremiah 3:4).

In The Simpsons episode entitled “Homer the Heretic,” Homer Simpson has a conversation with God.

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.