Hard Things of Faith

   Do you ever feel as though Jesus is not enough? I know I have.     I don’t know what your circumstances are, but I know that we all have circumstances that we believe are outside of the Lord’s reach.  Maybe you have lost a loved one and you feel the ache of death.  Maybe you have lost a relationship/ friendship with a person you just knew was the other half of you. Maybe you have lost a child, in the womb or after birth.  Maybe you are a single parent struggling to get through life on your own. There seem to be times when our hearts are so broken that we feel as though we will never be whole again.  I could go on and on about circumstances that leave us feeling alone and abandoned by the Lord My soul melts with sorrow;   strengthen me according to Your word.       Psalm   119:28   We hear that Jesus is all we need, but we struggle to believe it.  We try to find him but can’t ...

Jesus. There are so many facets of Jesus, it would take a lifetime to unpack them all.  Here are some of the ways that we know him though. He is the Son of God, the Bridegroom, Savior,  our Advocate, our High Priest.  We know him as the Author and Perfecter of our faith.  The thing I hear more than anything about Jesus is that he is love.  The part people sometimes do not understand is just how sacrificial his love is.  We should know how costly this sacrificial love is.  It is easy to say, "Jesus died for you", but how many people really know what that means and why that was necessary?  This certainly is not going to be one of those "feel good" posts that you are going to share as a way of encouraging others.  This is the smallest glimpse of the hard truth of sacrifice and why it was needed.  We will never understand the love of Christ until we understand the sacrifice of Christ.  Will you step back with me into the Old Testament a...

If you have read the recent posts, 19, Knocked up & no good  , Honor Thy Father , you have been given a small picture of me, my dad, and generational sin. The conclusion to this is about the Lord and his hand upon my life even before I knew him. It's about how he provided the way for me to find healing and forgiveness and love after abuse. I was 16 years old when my father almost drank himself to death. He had stripped the lining of his esophagus and was bleeding internally so severely that they weren't sure if they could save him. They told us that if he lived through the night, he would not live another five years. I went into that hospital chapel that Christmas night, and I prayed to God, whom I did not know, for my father to die. This was a result of all the verbal and emotional abuse that happened in my home. I thought life would be so much better without him. The Lord disagreed; my father made it through the night and lived another 25 years with a cirr...

If you read last week’s blog,  19, Knocked up & No Good , you got a snapshot of what life was like at home for me with my verbally and emotionally abusive dad.  I wrote last week's blog as a stand-alone blog about ministering to post-abortive women but…  As I read it and reread it, what stood out to me most was my dad.  My father was so much more than the snapshot I have given you.  Even though our history was tainted by the ugliness of abuse, he and I are so much the same.  We both wanted to be good but didn't know how.  We both desired acceptance, but it had always been just out of reach.   After he died and I healed from the hurt, which you can read about here . The Lord opened my eyes to a whole other side of who my father was.  He had his own story of abuse. I would love to tell you that my dad and I found healing before he died, but we didn’t.  Our last interaction was full of hurt, anger, and self-righteousness. Let ...