Learning To Fail and Succeed in God

Written by Rev. Daniel Forster

Take Today’s Next Step: Overcome fears. Share your faith.

God gives us the choice of how we wish to see the obstacles and mistakes that fill our lives. Like the other choices He allows us to make, we can either listen to the world and let failure consume us, or we can listen to Him and learn to succeed through Him.

“And Peter answered him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, ‘Lord, save me.’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, ‘O you of little faith, why did you doubt?’  (Matthew 14:28-31 ESV)

Faith Outside the Box

Betsy St. Amant

I grew up in the church—literally, I was there every time the doors were open for most of my childhood and beyond. There are so many blessings that come from a strong Christian heritage—but there are many challenges as well. Challenges that stem from routine and absorption, rather than life and certainty. I knew what I believed—I just had no idea why.

You see, as a Christian from a young age, I knew all the buzz words, the lingo, the native language of “church-ese”. I knew all the popular Bible verses and hymns by heart, which is fantastic in one sense, but devastating in another. When we get too familiar with something, it loses its impact. And the life-giving words tended to fly over my head and miss my heart completely.

Does Athiesm Require Faith?

"The fool has said in his heart that there is no God." - Psalm 14:1

One day, someone caught the comedian W.C. Fields reading the Bible and asked what he was doing. His reply was "just looking for loopholes."* There are a lot of people who read with the same intention of disregarding any evidence.

There are only three options to explain our existence, one is to believe in God, another is agnosticism which states there may be a God but I haven't found proof. The last is atheism where one will state they know God does not exist. Atheism is not just a non-belief in God but a willful denial of his existence. Agnosticism is where one admits that they do not know if God exists.

Stop Having Sex? I Did It -- For A Year

Audrey Bellis

Owner, The Bella Bambino

I gave up sex and dating. I gave it up just like I would give up chocolate for Lent. It was a very deliberate and conscious choice.

At the time, I had just turned 24, and was fresh off the heels of a broken engagement and sending out the "I'm sorry, I'm no longer getting married so here is your gift back" announcements. I was grieving, and I was lost.

I didn't realize I was on a downward spiral, I thought I was just rebounding. Everyone wanted to take me out for a drink, introduce me to their single friends, set me up and party my woes away. While these might have been well-meaning acts of support, they were not productive ways of coping for me. My behaviors led me to a dysfunctional rebound relationship, empty sex, drunken sex, quite a bit of guilty self-loathing and a vicious up and down cycle of convincing myself I was fine and the next day, not being able to get out of bed.

I Wasn’t Ready to be a Grandma!

Written by Joan Giesbrecht

“Mom, embrace it!”

My initial response to Amber’s words were, “Yeah, right, that’s easy for you to say.” But within seconds I thought, “She’s right. I really don’t have any other choice.” But with that “embrace” has come anguish as we’ve grieved but also much joy as we’ve seen God’s blessing in both the journey and the arrival of this precious little boy. While this event may have surprised all of us, it didn’t surprise God. Before the foundation of the earth He knew all about this journey. I want to share some of it with you.

Holding Onto Anger

They say to forgive someone is to set yourself free.


Unfortunately, Rodd had to learn that the hard way. When Rodd and his family moved to another city they it looked like the perfect opportunity. But when the deal fell through Rodd struggled with bitterness and anger. He had a choice: to forgive or continue being bitter. 


What would you have chosen? Do you need to let go of your anger and bitterness? We can show you how.

Video provided by: TruthMedia films

http://powertochange.com/discover/stories/holding-onto-anger/

Related:Do You Want True Forgiveness?

http://powertochange.com/discover/stories/holding-onto-anger/

Jesus in the Every day

How does Jesus affect people’s lives today?

In the time Jesus walked the earth, followers of Jesus would tell people of their personal encounters with him. At the end of The Passion of the Christ, we see Jesus get up from the tomb as He comes back to life from the dead – he is living today. People are still telling stories of their encounters with Jesus some two thousand years later. 

Explore the impact and relevance Jesus has today through these snapshots of people’s lives.

1) Free to make decisions without fear

I’m a planning freak and am always looking for the next step. Recently I had to make a pretty big career decision. As I weighed the pros and cons of the choice, I decided to try praying. Maybe I could glean some supernatural insight into my situation that felt so foggy.

No Matter What, I Love You

Parents – and God – love their children unconditionally, no matter what they do.


by Rea Bochner

When I was young, I would occasionally ask my mother, "Would you still love me if…," filling in the blank with some outlandish situation that would probably never happen, like accidentally burning down the house with a renegade stick of incense.

Her response was always the same: "No matter what, I will always love you".

Broken on the Back Row

Written by Sandi Patty

In the backseat the younger three kids—toddler Erin in her safety seat and the kindergartner twins, Jonathan and Jennifer sitting beside her—were quiet for once. They didn’t understand why yet another change had to happen in their lives but they trusted me to keep them safe and make things okay. Beside me in the front seat my oldest child, Anna, a second-grader, kept up a cheerful running commentary speculating on which friends she might see that morning.

I gripped the steering wheel with one hand and chewed a fingernail on the other a little nervous about what I was doing but knowing it was necessary. In that season of my life I felt very far away from God. It was not a comfortable place to be but it was nobody’s fault but my own. Wrong and sinful choices do that, they move you further away from God.

Why did 70,000 die while the sinner lived?

This week's reading: 1 Chronicles 21:14

It doesn't seem fair. Even David was distressed by the consequences his sin had on innocent people (see 1Ch 21:17). We may make our own choices, but we cannot control the extent of the consequences of sin.

Because of our Western individualism we struggle to understand the Eastern tradition in which the head of a family, tribe or nation represented the people under them. The members were treated as a whole, sharing in the blessings or punishments resulting from the actions of their leaders. Adam's sin had consequences for all humanity (see Ro 5:12). When Achan sinned, God said Israel has sinned (see Jos 7:1-11). Joshua had to identify the tribe, clan and family to which the sinner belonged.

In this case, it may have been Israel's sin as a nation that led to David's sin. The Lord was angry with Israel before David was incited to take a census (see 2Sa 24:1). For this reason, some see this as a plague upon a nation of people who had themselves sinned.

Lefties vs. Righties: How we decide differently

By Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine | Healthy Living

We like to think that we make decisions based on our ideas of right and wrong -- and we do, to an extent. But according to recent research, our choices may also be influenced by something as simple as whether we're right or left handed.

That's because right-handed people are more drawn to things on the right side of a screen or page, while left-handed people look to the left. Cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto of The New School for Social Research says it's part of the "body-specificity hypothesis" -- the idea thatour physical bodies affect the decisions we make and the way we communicate with one another. One of the easiest ways to measure this hypothesis is by looking at whether a person is a righty or a lefty.

"Handedness is a good tool (to use) because it's easily measurable, and our hands our important in how we interact with the physical world," Casasanto explained to MSNBC.

In his study, which was published in a recent edition Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Casasanto found that people tend to prefer the things that they see or experience on the same side as their dominant hand.

"People like things better when they are easier to perceive and interact with," he says. Right-handers interact with their environment more easily on the right than on the left, so they come to associate "good" with "right" and "bad" with "left," he explained.

"Since about 90 percent of the population is right-handed, people who want to attract customers, sell products, or get votes should consider that the right side of a page or a computer screen might be the 'right' place to be," he added.

We even tend to use our dominant side to differentiate positive ideas from negative ones. In 2004, presidential candidates John Kerry and George W. Bush -- both of whom are right-handed -- gestured more often with their right hands when expressing positive thoughts or ideas. In 2008, both Barack Obama and John McCain were left-handed, and both candidates used their left hands more often when expressing something positive.

The association with positivity extends to the choices everyday people make as well. When Casasanto asked study participants to decide between two products to buy, two job applicants to hire, or two alien creatures to trust, right-handed participants regularly chose the ones on the right side of the page, while south-paws chose the ones on the left.

That influence seems to extend beyond the physical world, influencing even abstract ideas like intelligence and honesty. Which means that it affects the way we understand one another as well, Casasanto says

"Most of the time, we feel like we understand each other because what a word means to me, is close enough to what it means to you," he says. "But it's never the same, and what a word means in your mind may depend on quirks of your body."

While the preference seems to hold true even for kids as young as 5 years old, it isn't absolute. People who are right-hand dominant but lose the use of that hand, even temporarily, start to associate "good" with "left" instead of "right."

"After a few minutes of fumbling with their right hand, righties start to think like lefties," Casasanto said in a statement. "If you change people's bodies, you change their minds." 

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/bodies-influence-decisions-223400296.html