Twenty Building Blocks Of Vision

1.     A vision begins as a concern.
As a pastor, you probably have a vision of great revival for your city. But it began as a concern for souls, then it grew into a burden for souls. It grew till it consumed your thoughts. This is the birthplace of vision. God has placed that vision there.

2.     A vision does not necessarily require immediate action.
When God speaks to you, he may not be giving you a vision for the immediate.  God’s timing is not our timing. When David was anointed king, he did not take the throne for many years.  He went through many hardships before he finally became king.

3.     Pray for opportunities and plan as if you expect God to answer your prayers.
The Bible says that the steps of the righteous are ordered by the Lord. Begin to pray for the right people and opportunities to be brought into your life...God will order your steps.

Faith Living: Finding Your Purpose

STEVE STRANG

(Master Isolated Images/Freedigitalphotos.net)

Risk is a primary component of faith, and the Bible teaches that without faith it is impossible to please God. In Matthew 25:14-30, Jesus condemned the unfaithful servant who would not risk his talent, but hid it to be safe. Jesus called him “wicked and lazy” and took the talent he had and gave it to the one who had invested his five talents and doubled them.

Regardless of our spiritual level—whether a young person full of the excitement of just following Christ, or one who has enjoyed a measure of success in following your dreams, or one who has followed God for many years and is tempted to coast—God wants us to move into risky living: faith living.

We should believe Him for new mountains to climb, new visions to pursue. That is how we grow and develop our faith and move from “glory to glory.” As my late mentor Jamie Buckingham put it so well, each of us should “attempt something so big that, without God, it’s bound to fail.”

Sexting: The new dating norm

by Kayleigh Dray

How often do you send a sexy text? You're not alone! Research has shown that sexting is has become part of our modern dating regimes thanks to the world of instant multimedia communication...

Sending a sexy text may feel pretty risque, but, thanks to new research, it has been proven that sexting is a vital and healthy part of modern dating.

Whether it's sexy photos or oh-so-detailed text messages (Fifty Shades Of Grey, eat your heart out!), sexting is a regular part of modern dating. After all, we've got to evolve our methods to keep up with all the instant multimedias on offer!

How to Be Successful and Satisfied

Written by Rusty Wright

Success is:______. How would you fill in the blank?

“That’s easy,” you might say. “Success is … for an athlete, winning the Super Bowl, the World Series, or a gold medal: for an entertainer, winning an Oscar, a Grammy, or an Emmy; for a businessperson, being a top executive with one of the Fortune 500 companies: for a university student, being elected to Phi Beta Kappa or student government.” But is it always so easy to define?

Several years ago Ranier, a German friend, spent three months with me in the U. S. Once, while he was watching his first baseball game on TV, the batter hit the ball out of the park for a home run. The fans went wild! Ranier turned to me with a puzzled look and asked, “Why are they cheering? They’ve lost the ball?” To the hometown fans the batter was a great success. To someone from another culture, the home run was a mystery.

No Regrets! Successful Aging Means Letting Go of ‘What Ifs?’

Regretting past mistakes may help young people make better decisions in the future. But for the elderly, emotional health may mean not dwelling on things you can't change.

By MAIA SZALAVITZ

Edith Piaf, the French idol who popularized the song “Non, je ne regrette rien” (No, I have no regrets), was far from an example of healthy aging, dying of liver cancer at 47. But new research published in Science shows that a philosophy of “no regrets” may be critical to emotional health in later life.

Researchers imaged the brains of 21 healthy young people, 20 people who had developed depression after age 55 (they were mainly in their 60s at the time of the study), and 20 healthy senior citizens. While the participants were being scanned, they played a video game in which they opened a series of boxes, moving sequentially from left to right. Eight boxes were presented in each trial and opening each revealed either “gold,” which had a certain money value, or a picture of a devil, which meant the loss of all the winnings from the prior boxes.

(MORE: Brain Aging: What’s Nintendo Got to Do With It?)

Participants could choose to stop and collect their winnings at any point. At the end, the position of the devil was revealed, providing players an opportunity to see whether they’d stopped at the right time and won the largest possible amount. This, of course, carried potential for regret — even though the game was primarily one of chance, not skill.