I have one word for giving myself an expectation that I will share a story of lived out faith in a prior post: idiot.  I find that when I set up expectations of what I should do that I often fail to meet them.  (laugh) And then I run into hiding with my tail between my legs.

Speaking about tails, I begin teaching in two days.  Expecations and failure seem to breathe down my neck daily as I struggle and procrastinate to develop a unit on Tolstoy's Master and Man.

Would you pray for me?  And would you pray with me?  God I want you to be known to these kids, and I know that begins and continues with our interaction together.  Help me to be faithful with my remaining time of preparation and wherever I get to be ready to love Mr. Liegel, my cooperating teacher, and the students that you have given to me.  Thank you!

May you enjoy Him today in this New Year!

I like where our conversation about change has gone so far.  The three major words that have stood out have been the Holy Spirit, action and flavor. 

Brought together it might sound like something of the following:

The flavor of who you are lived out in active response to the Holy Creator of this world who is humble enough to come and walk with you and if you have accepted his mercy in you.

How are you doing this this week?  How am I doing this this week?  How has an understanding that the Spirit is here and that I am called into an active faith flushed out into loving the people God has placed me in relationship with?

The post after the following one should be a story of how I have been trying to live out a faith in Christ in loving Jessica, Kilty, Riley, and/or Jack.

I would love to hear yours.

Do you ever, like me, get impatient with the people God places in your life, wishing that they would just go away and that you could lie down and finally get some rest?  Do you ever feel like enough is enough—that you’re done?

Last night in Dynamics of Biblical Change with David Powlison, he led the class through 2 Cor. 1:1-12 in a discussion on suffering.

And the verses that sang to my too often self-preoccupied soul were 9 and 10:

Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.  [In order that] we may not rely on ourselves but on God who raised the dead.  He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us.  On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.

Now, I don’t pretend to suffer anywhere close to what Paul is talking about.  But often when I am tired at night, I experience a kind of death sentence in my exhaustion and it is in that seemingly small insignificant suffering that God calls me to not belittle it but embrace it in His direction and then give up my tiredness to him, knowing that if he can raise the dead then surely he knows what I need and will provide in the appropriate time.

The appropriate time is the second humbling part as I think of friends and family members who experience continual suffering that seems to know no end.  How can they find hope?  And it seems to come in the pleading with and towards a creator God who knows suffering, is here, and cares very much what is going on.  “Be not deaf to me…Hear the voice of my pleas for mercy, when I cry for help” (Psalm 28).  And it comes in the hope of the promise that “he will deliver us” (2 Cor. 1:10).  For it is not our circumstances or our own understanding that we place our hope upon, but on the one who has resurrected the dead.

God in the midst of my brothers and sisters suffering would you show yourself faithful.  Bring encouragement and your powerful presence to bear through Spirit in and through them.

He cares and he is here.

-Psalm 28