All In A Days Grace

  Have you heard the expression “Fight fire with fire” ? That’s when you come back at something or someone with the same thing that they came at you with. Someone comes at you angry; you give them anger back. When someone comes at you arrogantly you give them arrogance back. You get the idea. It’s a vicious cycle really; because the discussion or argument or situation never becomes about a resolution. It simply becomes about sustaining the level of animosity or maintaining an equilibrium of anger; none of which are healthy or Christ like. We can look at these situations like mini storms in our lives; things that come at us in a moments notice. Someone cuts us off in an aggressive way, or blindsides us with a less than kind criticism. In both cases we’re taken off guard and a feeling deep within us erupts. Suddenly we find ourselves behaving aggressively back to the other driver or saying unkind words to the person who we feel has verbally violated us. If we look at these time...

  “A man with leprosy came and knelt in front of Jesus, begging to be healed. “If you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean,” he said. “Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out and touched him.  “I am willing,”  he said.  “Be healed!”     Instantly the leprosy disappeared, and the man was healed. -Mark 1:40-42   Sometimes the “if” gets in our way. There is a great deal behind that word “if” in this verse. The man doesn’t simply ask Jesus to heal him. There is an air of doubt in the word “If”.   What it tells us is that the man wasn’t sure that Jesus would. It wasn’t that he wasn’t sure if Jesus “could”. In that case he would have said “If you are able…”. This man is not sure if Jesus is willing. How many times have we held back from our prayers simply because we weren’t sure if God was “willing” to help us; our presumed reasons for His assumed unwillingness usually being a long laundry list of our inadequacies’ and/or shortcomi...

  One day many years ago I found myself consumed in my thoughts. I was thinking about all the things going on in my life and those around me. I tried to compose a prayer request in my mind, but as each thought came to mind the “prayer” became more like a “compilation of worried thoughts”.  These are those thoughts that keep you up at night. These are those thoughts that seem to go through the mind in a repetitive way, never resting or pausing; the kind of thoughts that just don’t seem to have anywhere to rest. They constantly revolve like a never ending carousel ride that you can’t get off of. On this particular day of revolving thoughts I decided to do something I hadn’t tried before. I sat down and wrote all of these thoughts (aka worries) out on a piece of paper. I then took the peace of paper in my hand and said to God … “Lord, there’s so much going on that I just can’t control. My mind has become consumed with worry and I just can’t carry all these burdens around, so ...