Home Archive by category "Spiritual Growth" (Page 22)

Category: Spiritual Growth

My Canadian Buddy, Tyler

Here is a picture of my Canadian buddy, Tyler, doing what he loves best: READING! I have never met Tyler in person (yet!) but I hope to some day! His parents are missionaries in a remote part of northern Canada, where kids church looks like this: (Tyler in the yellow shirt) I got to know Tyler via his mom when I learned that he is a big fan of Toyboxtales.com, my novel (Order of the Ancient), and my blog. In fact, I am blogging about him today in order to encourage him with his new blog, since I just discovered tonight that he credited me as his “inspiration” to begin his blogging career: Maybe some of the zillions who come here can visit his blog and leave a comment to encourage him! Here is Tyler, at a local landmark–the moose head at the gas station, with the autographed copy of my novel I sent him after I learned that he only had the downloads and needed to clear up some harddrive space and was sad to lose it. (The book was released originally online a chapter a week, which is when Tyler read it) Here is Tyler in trouble with…

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Friends Are the Ones Around When it Rains

Friends Are the Ones Around When it Rains In high school we got sick of the M. Smith song, “Friends are friends forever.” Real life teaches you it isn’t true. Those you thought were friends for years can forget you and even turn on you if you don’t live up to their expectations. And it hurts. I used to use the teaching tool: A true friend C.A.R.E.S. when teaching kids: C = challenges you to be a better person A = accepts you just the way you are, they don’t reject you when you mess up R = respects you, they don’t do things to hurt or damage you, they don’t ‘get even’ E = encourages you – they are there when you need them most S = sticks with you, no matter what A genuine friend who was in town this week said something that I wanted to post here: “A friend is someone who runs in when everyone else is running out.” I just wanted to say thank you to those who have been a genuine friend to me in the past several months… there have been many, and often not the ones I would have expected. God…

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The Love of God is Overwhelming

Today I was amazed that my devotional reading was perfectly exactly what I needed today. Then, as I shared it with my wife, she noticed that I was actually off by a day… I’m not sure when I missed a day and as I expressed my disappointment that I “goofed” somehow and got off in my Oswald Chambers Journal, my wife pointed out, that if today’s message was exactly what I needed, then God actually had me get off somehow so that I would “accidently” read today’s today, instead of when I supposed to. All that to say, even in our mundane mistakes, God is at work. Today was a difficult day in my private journey as a pilgrim of Christ. I’ll leave it at that as far as details go, but enough to say, of all the difficult days I may experience in life, today will always be one of the most difficult I ever had to face. And yet God’s peace was evident and his mercy flowed freely and his grace was abundant. My passage today (accidently) was “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Romans 8:37) I’d like to share…

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Making Missions Minded Friends

I’ve had a heart for missions since I was a young boy and my mom told our children’s church the story of Amy Carmichael. Since then I’ve been to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippians, Hungry, Austria, Germany, France, England, Whales, Spain, and elsewhere doing some kind of mission work, usually children’s ministry related, and I am the son of a former Missions Pastor at Moody Church who is now a director of something or other (I can’t keep track of his titles) at OCI in Colorado Springs… BUT even with all these rubs with missionary work, I have to admit my ignorance that there has been a Children’s Missions Movement steadily advancing the cause of encouraging and supporting the effort to introduce children to missions and help churches with missions education for the past twenty years. This losely structured group of missions minded people have met periodically over the years with a fluid collection of individuals coming together to evaluate where we are in introducing missions to kids and educating churches in how to promote world missions within the local church, as well as to evaluate what resources are available, and what is still needed. I will be writing a Kidology…

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Slow Down. There is beauty that is often missed.

I was in Orlando last week for the Children’s Pastor’s Conference and will be posting more about that on Kidology.org, but I wanted to post some pictures from the Coranado Springs Resort where I stayed. But I have to tell you something about myself… I don’t take the usual pictures! I like to see what others walk right past. All of the pictures below (and it was hard to narrow down the ones I wanted to post) were taken right off the path at the resort. Behind a bush, down by the water, over a bridge, beside a building, etc. At my new slower pace of life I am taking more time to slow down and open my eyes to the beauty around me, and it was actually fun to be stopping and taking close up pictures of nature in a very ‘man-made’ place with people scurring past me in a hurry to get to the amusement park or other activities. Several times people stopped and asked, “What are you taking a pictures of?” surprised to see me kneeling or hunched over where there didn’t really appear to be anything worth the effort… but I think these pictures prove that…

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