Faith

Few things can pierce a parent’s heart as painfully as their children’s decision to walk away from God. Pain, guilt, shame and the feeling of failure are the crushing burdens which parents of prodigal sons carry, while still wavering between hope and discouragement.

"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...

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.

On the night when heaven descended among mortals, it was not the high priests or scholars who were the first to see God, but some lowly shepherds.

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 was in the park with my little girl when a heavy summer shower began, driving us home. My little girl wanted us to stop for a moment in the stairwell of our apartment building to watch the rain. After standing there for a few seconds, I heard her whisper, "God, You're getting soaked."

I was descending from Omu Peak, in the Bucegi Mountains, with a few dozen young people. It had not been an ideal hike, and we were behind schedule. The forest made the darkness even thicker as it began to cover the mountain, and slowly, our minds as well.

Even if there were a thousand people in a room with Pastor Jim Ayer, you wouldn't be able to miss him. He towered over most people by at least a head and always wore a black hat with a wide brim. I recognised him as the friendly host of a programme on Adventist World Radio, for which he travelled to the most unusual...

To nothing else is the name of God so often linked in our human discourse as to suffering and deliverance. This locus is a huge and complicated intersection of our existence.

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

When all we have left is God and He remains silent, we need a faith that endures, even when our resources are depleted and we feel as though we have been forgotten.

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?

Trying to describe a dying church like the one he was called to serve, Pastor Chris Lewis uses the image of a car "turned over, in a ditch, covered by weeds and beer cans, with a rusted out engine, and a couple of bodies in the trunk."

It’s not hard to misinterpret the Bible. I’ve done it, most people I know have done it and if you’ve read it enough, I’d bet you’ve done it too. It isn’t surprising then, that throughout history many have misinterpreted the Bible, especially when it comes to complex ideas like the end of the world and Jesus’ second coming.

The book written by John Ortberg, All the Places to Go... How Will You Know? invites us to reflect on the discerning of God’s will for our lives.