Faith

Live every day like it is your our last! Many use these phrase as a prop for their riskiest decision, or simply to justify a recklessly extravagant lifestyle. But what would our lives look like if we were to really live each day fully aware that it might be our last?

Life is a fascinating mystery and a constant challenge. Yet, often, we are not content with merely experiencing life as it is.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I attended a university in Brisbane, Australia, two hours from where I lived. I had a friend in the city who I’d sometimes stay with to avoid having to travel back and forth on back-to-back uni days.

Dr Carlton Byrd is the director and main speaker of Breath of Life, a television broadcast dedicated to the urban colored population in the U.S. and the Pastor of the Oakwood University Church.

If there is a crossroads where both the path of faith and the path of doubt or unbelief begin, it is prayer.

The sermons. My mother’s stories. The little sand table and Sabbath School for children. Adults’ conversations about religion. All the information I absorbed in childhood helped me sketch an image of Jesus with one major flaw: it was rendered in far too many shades of grey.

On a number of occasions during his writing life, Nobel Prize winner and author Elie Wiesel tried to re-tell the story of a profound experience he’d had as a young boy in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. He wrote a play, a novel, and even a cantata to try to re-create his memory of this event, each of which remained unpublished. Finally,...

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.

The journey "through the valley of the shadow of death" has never been easy. However, it has become increasingly lonely as our unfamiliarity with death has made us awkward and reserved when interacting with the dying.

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.

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.

Edinburgh Castle sits proudly on the hill overlooking the city. Buildings and tourist shops crowd its feet, right up to the gate, where the square is being prepared for the famous Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

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.

Living one day according to God's plan is a good idea to start with. But learning to live in such a way every day is something else.

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."