Faith

Sinking into darkness, after 14 years of enjoying all the spectacles of grace and beauty in which our world is enveloped, can be the beginning of tragedy. Or it can be the moment when you begin to discern, nuance by nuance, the splendour of a reality that healthy eyes so often miss.

On April 26th 1986, reactor 4 at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded. The effects were catastrophic­­—it was the worst nuclear disaster in history. The explosion let out the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs-worth of radiation, and the area around Chernobyl—including the town of Pripyat—is now uninhabited. It will be unsafe to live there for the next 20,000 years.

Last night I had one of those dreams. You know, the kind you wake up from and remember. Basically, there were a lot of things that were unusual, but people and places that were familiar—common themes for many who remember their dream content.

"Lianne struggled with the idea of God," Don DeLillo’s narrator says of one of the characters in his novel, Falling Man. "She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state… . We want to transcend, to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding— and what better way to do...

Have you ever travelled with someone you thought you really liked, only to see a different side of them as the trip progressed? People say travelling is a good way to determine whether someone is “the one” or not. How do they respond when things don’t go according to plan? In their sleep deprivation, will they become aggressive toward the flight attendants? How...

We’d been married only a few weeks when we discovered that growing our spirituality as a couple was going to be much more complicated than the instructions on the packet suggested.

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.

“Is God dead?” was the question on the cover of Time magazine on April 8, 1966. Three-and-a-half years later (December 26, 1969), the publication changed that to: “Is God coming back to life?”

"Even if you're imprisoned for life, that's still a short time. After that, Jesus will come back. All you have to do is try to make the best of the situation you're in' (Lindy Chamberlain). 

"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?

Have you ever done something you immediately regret? Perhaps you’ve let your emotions get the better of you, lost control and said something particularly harsh to a friend in the heat of a moment—you wish you could take the words back the moment they left your lips.

Could we have a quality Christian ministry without an authentic relationship with God? Anyone can pretend in the short term, but to truly succeed in the long term you need a devotional life full of passion and a continual closeness to Jesus Christ.

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. 

The question of human suffering concerns atheists and believers alike. For the former, the search for an answer drives them to the heights of despair. For the latter, suffering inevitably poses a dilemma: why is there so much suffering in the world if the God who created it is loving and omnipotent?

“All  need  Thee,  even those  who  are  unaware  of  their  need—these  most  of  all.  He  who  hungers  goes  in  search  of  bread  and  knows  not  that  his  hunger  is  for  Thee;  he  who  thirsts  imagines  that  his  longing  is  for  water,  but  his  thirst  is  for  Thee;  he  who  is  sick  believes  he  is  seeking  health  by  many  means,  and  his  sickness  is ...