Living life with steps of faith

A reinterpretation in my own words of Galatians 5:1, 13-26, done as a spiritual exercise to become more familiar with the text: ( 1) One of the desired outcomes of the work of Christ on the cross is our freedom. It takes strength and commitment to not yield to the pressures that push against our living in the freedom that Christ has purchased for us. And yet to give in to those burdens is to place upon ourselves a heavy lifeless weight. (13) Our calling is freedom! Don’t use your freedom to choose to go back to the life you had before your freedom was given to you.  Don’t be like the Israelites in the wilderness who cried out that life was better when they were slaves in Egypt! When we are focused on loving each other from a place of humility, we are embracing our freedom. (14) If we only follow the Golden Rule, we will have fulfilled the entire law of God. (15) When we live our life being defensive and attacking others, we will then have reason to think we nee...

I think there can be a lot more of God, husband, and wife working together to create a baby through Assisted Reproductive Technologies than the Catholic church gives credit.  When a couple is struggling to have a child, they really grasp how much the formation of a human being is the result of God's miraculous work. (Thus, why so many people get angry at God during the grief of infertility and why so many give God the glory when they do conceive after a time of barrenness.)  But when a couple, married or not, learn that the woman has conceived easily after intercourse, conception doesn't have to be viewed as miraculous.  Some argue that IVF focuses on science in place of god.  The same argument could be made about natural, easy conception through intercourse: conception is just the result of the science of the sperm and egg meeting. Talk to anyone working in the field of reproductive endocrinology and they will tell you that they can't make a baby...

Why is there suffering in the world? A.       God created a beautiful world and gave humans volition (the power of using one’s own will). ( Genesis 1 & 2 ) B.       God gave us instructions on how to live well.  We can choose to follow God’s advice or choose to go our own way. (The book: The Bible .) C.        Problem is that when we choose to go our own way we create brokenness.  That brokenness impacts everything and everyone! ( Genesis 3 & 4 ) D.       There is suffering in the world because people choose to disobey God’s wise advice and the earth, our bodies, and our relationships have suffered as a result. ( Romans 8:18-22 ) So how do we find Joy in the midst of the suffering? A.       Recognize that Joy flows from God & we become conduits of this Joy when we worship God. ( Psalm ) B.    ...

A young man is put to death for blaspheming God's name during a fight.  It wasn't the fight that killed him, but his misuse of God's name.  We read about this incident in Leviticus 24 and it serves as the antidote for the famous, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" legislation. I read the story and I am humbled by the fullness of God's holiness.  I live by grace and sometimes I allow that grace to interfere with my checking myself for sin. How many times have I injured another person and felt justified and even proud?  Have I ever been disrespectful with God's name? Would I have survived during the time period in which the Law was being discovered? I am a good girl, but not that good. None of us really are. Yesterday I had to have a disciplinary conversation with a young girl on my soccer team about something she did that unintentionally caused harm.  She didn't mean it for evil, she just really didn't know any better.  She could have felt justi...

We have lived so long in the covenant of grace, we have forgotten what life was like during the covenant of holiness. This morning as I continued my chapter a day reading through the holiness code of Leviticus, I was struck by the contrast between Jesus' role as the great high priest and the original boundaries drawn for that role.  The great high priest had been set apart from the world.  He was to live in such a way that his lifestyle represented the holiness of God.  He couldn't marry whomever he wanted, but must marry a kin who was a virgin.  He could not attend his wife's funeral, nor touch her body. If his child had any physical disability or "abnormality" the child would not even be considered for the role of the high priest in the future.  See Leviticus 21. Although Jesus never married, his life crossed the boundary lines of the holiness code.  He shared a cup of water with a "loose" woman, a Samaritan no less. He touched the coffin of th...

My new frustration is that I am blessed to be in relationship with a lot of needy kids, and yet I am limited in what I can do for them.  Between being a "parent" volunteer for Boy Scouts, coordinator for our church's kids ministry, and coach for a new girl's soccer team, there are many children in my life.  And my heart breaks for several of them.  I just want to take them home and raise them.  I see all the ways their parents are failing them (yes, this is overstated) and it breaks my heart.  I am restricted in how I am allowed to discipline them, because I'm not their parent.  I don't get to give them each the one-on-one care that they need, because I usually see them in a group setting and I don't have the "right" to provide that one-on-one care, nor the time to provide it for all forty of them. And if I were given that blessing to care for them "one-on-one" which of them would I choose to the neglect of the others? In infertility...

Four months without tears and my heart breaks again.  Who knew that car shopping could be so traumatic?  Each step forward into a new future is different and it appears that purchases can be painful. My poor husband. I've chosen a car, now lets just buy it and get the process over with now. He wants to wait.  I say, "okay."  It seems he wants to wait to purchase the more expensive one. Then he suggests we purchase a replacement light for my office.  The light fixture fell down over a year ago and it still hasn't been replaced.  This is suppose to be the nursery. A year has passed without replacing the fixture in hopes that it could be replaced with something more nursery appropriate. I pick out a fixture that is $100 that I could see working for both a nursery and office.  Too expensive. I must admit before this errand began I did agree to buy an inexpensive light that could be replaced when we changed the office to a nursery.  So, I choose one...