First on my list is a book called One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.

This book is about gratitude and joy in a way that I have never experienced or been taught, and it is written with such poetic and compelling beauty.  As Christianbook.com says, “Discover a way of seeing that opens your eyes to everyday amazing grace, a way of living that is fully alive, and a way of experiencing the constant presence of God that will bring you deep and lasting joy.”  That is the perfect summary.  In fact, I am at a loss for words beautiful enough to describe how your life may be touched and changed.

Next on my list is Families Where Grace is in Place by Jeff VanVonderen.

This is a book that has also radically changed my life.  Far too many of us live under a list of rules governing us, a handful of people controlling us, or a “law” that breeds guilt and condemnation.  This book teaches about new covenant living–the freedom that Jesus Christ purchased for us with His death on the cross (and for those who have been born again, our own death to sin and law).  It is a must read for those who want to have a marriage or family (immediate or extended) that is characterized by grace rather than manipulation and control.

Third on the list is a book along the same lines as the last one–Grace-Based Parenting by Tim Kimmel.

Author Tim Kimmel says, “If we have flawed theology regarding God’s attitude toward us, it can automatically create a chain reaction of flawed decisions in how we raise our children. It can set up our children to miss the joy of God, the heart of God, and the power of God in their personal lives.” He goes on to teach about grace-based parenting verses legalistic-based parenting and this book has been truly an eye-opening, motivating, and life-changing book.

My last selection and recent-read is Our Last Great Hope by Ronnie Floyd.

This book is written to awaken us to become refocused on and recommitted to the Great Commission.  Author Ronnie Floyd says, ”Hell is a place I will never visit, but I can spend eternity enjoying the knowledge that I helped reduce its size.  What’s on your calendar for today?  Any agenda items more pressing than those?” This book motivated me (without shaming me), gave me action steps (without overwhelming me) and reminded me that I was already fully equipped (as we all are) to be obedient to God’s calling to make disciples.

Look for an extended review of Our Last Great Hope later this month.

And happy reading!  If you have read any life-changing books lately, fiction or nonfiction, please share them with me!

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Post tags: books, christian living

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For those who are interested in evangelism and the Great Commission–in learning just how many people are accepting Jesus as their Savior and having their names written in the Book of Life versus those who are rejecting Jesus or are not being given the opportunity to learn about His saving grace–I would encourage you to check it out.  It is sobering.  It is heartbreaking.  It may even prompt action.

“He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation’” (Mark 16:15).

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

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Post tags: missions

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A statement of Colson’s legacy on his website says it well:

“Colson maintained that the greatest joy in life for him was to see those ‘living monuments’ to God’s grace: Prisoners transformed by the love of Jesus Christ.”

As a Christian, especially one who has studied and is fascinated by culture groups and sociology, Chuck Colson was a hero of mine in how he engaged the culture in conversations of eternal consequence and seemed to find that beautiful balance of how to be in the world but “not of the world” (John 15:19).

Heaven rejoices as a great man of God has now joined that celebration, and even though the world mourns his death, I look forward to meeting Mr. Colson for the first time someday, as we worship our Lord together.

Here are a couple of my book reviews of two of Chuck Colson’s excellent books:

The Faith

Burden of Truth

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“For most of my life I have been struck by the inconsistency of the pro-choice position. If a woman is happy about her pregnancy, then she is carrying a baby; otherwise, she is carrying a fetus. An unborn child can be aborted, and yet we are mortified when pregnant women drink or smoke. No one posts ultrasound pictures to Facebook and says, “Look at my fetus!” We celebrate unborn children when we want them, but we distance ourselves from them when we don’t want them.

And this position, while inconsistent, makes sense to me. It is hard to hold a consistent pro-choice position. It requires us to say and do things that are distasteful to us. It would require us to listen to a pregnant woman go on and on about her baby and say to her, “Well, it really isn’t a baby yet.” It would require us to be utterly unsentimental about ultrasound pictures. It would require us to stop telling pregnant women how to take care of their bodies while pregnant. I am not surprised that the pro-choice position is typically inconsistent because there is a level of proper shame that keeps us from that kind of consistency.

But that inconsistency is being challenged now.”

Read the rest of Franklin’s article here.

I also strongly encourage you to go see the movie October Baby.  It sensitively addresses the issue of abortion through the eyes of a young woman who finds out that she survived an abortion attempt and, as she is coming to terms with this and all the health problems that she has faced as a result, goes on a road trip to meet her biological mother.

I appreciated this movie because all too often in the media, pro-lifers are erroneously shown to be only caring about the unborn baby, and not about the mother in the crisis pregnancy (who all too often is uninformed about her choices and what is really at stake), and this movie shows compassion for the mother as well.  If you go, stay through the final credits for an extra, important piece of the storyline.

You can find more information about the movie at this movie review website, Plugged In.

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The Bible tells me that I have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16), that I received it when I accepted Christ as my Savior, as the only One who could free me from my enslavement to sin (including the sin of worry).  However, I do not claim that promise often enough and instead of thinking of “whatever is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, excellent and worthy of praise” (Philippians 4:8), I am often tempted to think of whatever is scary, worrisome, uncertain, out of my control, unlikely to happen, and harmful to my body and spirit.

Pastor John MacArthur has said, “Worry is needless because of God’s bounty, senseless because of God’s promise, useless because of its impotence to do anything productive, and faithless because it is characteristic of unbelievers.”

Ouch!  But true.  Does this mean that, along with engaging in something needless, senseless, and useless, I’m also weakening my witness to unbelievers because of my worry?  I believe so!  Are they drawn to the awesomeness of God when they see me exhibiting such a lack of trust in my Creator, Provider, and Heavenly Father?  I’m showing (contrary to what I actually believe) that I don’t rest in God’s promises to love and not condemn (Romans 8:1), to work everything for my good (Romans 8:28), and to take care of me even more than He cares for the birds of the air (Matthew 6:25-34).  Will He “supply all my needs according to His riches in glory” (Philippians 4:19)?  Will His grace be sufficient for anything I need and His power “perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9)?   Is He “able to guard what I have entrusted to Him” (2 Timothy 1:12)?  Will I take care of my body which is the “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19)?

I’d really like to just get over myself already (isn’t worry just a whole lot of self-focus?), stop excusing it with “well, worry is just what mother’s do,” and put my mind’s focus solely on loving and worshipping God. . .because He is worthy of my whole mind and the list of praiseworthy things about God that I could think on, instead of the endless list of earthly things that I concern myself with, is eternally long.  And I know He’s already given me enough grace to get there–but as many before me have pointed out, we are in a battle for our mind and the arsenal we need to take our mind back from the Enemy in this battleground is found in reading, memorizing and meditating on the Word of God and hiding it in our heart (Psalm 119:11) and MIND.  Hopefully, by God’s grace and enablement, I can chip away at my undisciplined mind a little bit more and more so that my life will draw unbelievers to the God that saves, provides, and is fully and completely trustworthy.

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Many of us think of idols as those bronze statues that we bow down to, but if only that were the only kinds of idols we make.  A definition for idolatry from my Webster’s Dictionary says it is “excessive admiration or devotion” and calls an idol “a person or thing devotedly or excessively admired; a false notion.”  The way that I understand it, this includes the material (money, gold, people) and the non-material (fame, love, comfort) idols that we can create; the people, things or ideals that we place in direct competition to God for our focus and attention.

For myself, I have made an idol–a false god–out of my health. . .and my god will fail me.

It began innocently enough.  I developed an interest in health in my early 20’s and decided that before starting a family, I would become as knowledgeable as possible on how to take care of myself and my family from a nutritional standpoint.  I went back to school and ate up those textbooks on enzymatic therapy and power food antioxidants!  I finished a master’s program in holistic nutrition and began implementing many of the principles that I read about and studied into my family’s diet and routine.  Sometime after this, good health changed from a passion to something I felt that I needed in order to feel in control.  Health became my god.

And then I started to feel tired all the time and I developed food sensitivities that left me often guessing what was wrong.  That’s the thing about being overly focused on your health–you then start to notice each and every sign of your body being out of balance, and if that is your measure of security, your mind and body can be your worst enemy.  Yes, I have a gluten-free and dairy-free diet that I am supposed to follow in order to feel at my best.  And yes, I can get incredibly cranky with too much sugar.  But the more my need for perfect health took over (and who has perfect health?!), the more I began to obsess about it.  And the more that I began to need my health more than I needed my God, the more God lovingly showed me that any god we put in place of Him will fail us.  My health can never comfort me and love me and protect me like my Savior can.  All gods will fail except the One True God that has proven Himself over and over again to be trustworthy, capable, and personally interested in each one of us.

So I gave up my idol–with my words of surrender which I often have to repeat daily and in the way I try to live “by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7); living by what I know to be true about God and His love and protection over me rather than what signs of health or lack thereof I see in my body.  Health is a great blessing from God.  It is something for which I continue to strive and always will as my body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).  But my motivation is different, my intensity is different, and my need to have control over it is different–because any control I try to obtain is just an illusion anyway.

I remember well what Pastor Jack Graham said one time as he battled prostate cancer, and this may be a paraphrase of what he said, “My power in this life is not in my strong constitution–it’s by God’s Spirit.”  It is this truth from Zechariah 4:6 that I remind myself of often.

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Should the Rich Be Condemned?

This column by ACRU Policy Board Member and Professor of Economics Dr. Walter E. Williams was published November 23, 2011 on Townhall.com.

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, the phonograph, the DC motor and other items in everyday use and became wealthy by doing so. Thomas Watson founded IBM and became rich through his company’s contribution to the computation revolution. Lloyd Conover, while in the employ of Pfizer, created the antibiotic tetracycline. Though Edison, Watson, Conover and Pfizer became wealthy, whatever wealth they received pales in comparison with the extraordinary benefits received by ordinary people. Billions of people benefited from safe and efficient lighting. Billions more were the ultimate beneficiaries of the computer, and untold billions benefited from healthier lives gained from access to tetracycline.

President Barack Obama, in stoking up class warfare, said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” This is lunacy.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Post tags: capitalism, Politics

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Please understand that this is not an attack on the medical community nor cesarean sections as a whole.  I believe that there are numerous labors and deliveries that require such drastic medical intervention and thank God that He has placed those skills in talented and caring individuals to help in that time.  I am also fully aware that doctors today, because of our insanely litigious society, have to be very sensitive to anything at all that might (no matter how slim the chance) go wrong.

This is more of a blog about the emotions of a mom. . .the feelings of helplessness after a cesarean that many moms experience and the regrets that plague us, even when we did all that we could do.  This is also about what I see as a hidden epidemic, if you will.  Some of society seem to present cesarean sections as no big deal. . .as just another birthing option. . .the easier choice because you can bypass all the labor, schedule it on your time-table, and be more in control of your labor and delivery.  I resent this inaccurate presentation.  Listening to Mary, reliving my own experience, and reading others accounts makes me realize just how deep these wounds can go, and they are anything but easy to mend.

So I wonder, for those of you who had c-sections with the birth of your first child (or subsequent children), what was your experience and did you (or do you still) experience any of these same emotions?   If these statistics are true (see International Cesarean Awareness Network here), that “32.9% of births result in major abdominal surgery” and that 2009, when this study was conducted, was the “13th consecutive year to show increase,” there are plenty of us out there that have gone through this surgery.  How many of you have felt as Mary and I did, and still do?  Let’s have the discussion. . .

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Post tags: cesarean, moms, motherhood

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Post tags: holocaust, ray comfort

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1.  Evil exists.

My son loves good guy/bad guy scenarios–whether in movies, books, or his own vivid imagination.  He pits good against evil every day with his army guys, matchbox cars or detailed drawings in his sketchbook.  And although, in real life, none of us are “good” of our own accord (Romans 3:23), the underlying principle of a battle being waged in the unseen world in which we are all players, is very real (Ephesians 6:12 “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”).  Unfortunately, not only does evil exist in partnership with free will to commit that evil, but not one of us is immune–apart from God, we are a slave to our sin nature which is at work tempting us to all sorts of evil, and September 11th reminds us of that.  It reminds us that we need a Savior.

2.  Death is certain.

This life is but a blip on the screen of eternity.  My heart breaks for those who lost a loved on in the terrorist attacks 10 years ago.  My heart also breaks for those who have lost loved ones by other means.  We all have, or will face that sorrow, unfortunately.  And we all must face death ourselves one day.  Are you certain, without any doubt, that you are going to spend eternity in heaven with God?  If not, do you know how you can be?

3.  What’s the Point?

My family is in the middle of a painful trial right now and I can tell you with certainty that the Lord God is the only thing fully sustaining us.  I also know that I never want to face a single trial without Him.  Furthermore, what’s the point of going through a trial if it doesn’t bring us more to the end of ourselves and fully surrendered at the feet of our Savior?  Self-help books may say, “trials make you stronger,” and maybe in the short-term that could be true, but sooner or later our own resources will run out, and it is only in our weakness that Christ’s strength abounds (2 Corinthians 12:9).  It’s only as we become less central to our lives that He becomes more in us (John 3:30).  I see trials as totally futile unless they bring us to Jesus.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  They would just be terribly difficult things that have no lasting purpose!  September 11th, 2001 brought many to Jesus.  I pray for our nation, and us individually, to turn to Him again, as our Sustainer, Savior, and Friend.

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Post tags: Christianity, september 11th

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