On a night when you’re far from city lights and the sky is cloudless, the view is enough to stop you in your tracks. Plum-black backdrop, speckled with a thousand pinpricks of light. And the longer you stare, the more those thousand multiply into a thousand thousands. The dimmest distant stars reveal themselves.
Moving Forward: Walking though Grief
by Pastor Jon Nelson
A few years ago my mother lost her battle with cancer. While her death was not sudden, it was devastating. Over the following days I walked through a myriad of emotions that affected not just myself but my family also. Grief is a normal response to loss. It is an emotional process that affects people in many different ways. It is normal to feel like you are on an emotional rollercoaster, that your reactions are out of control. Although it is a normal process, it can be quite difficult to navigate, especially as a student. The grieving process can disrupt routines, impact deadlines, and make focusing on taking care of yourself and completing your assignments difficult. Sometimes it can be hard to disclose your struggles to others. You may not want to “burden” them or retell the same story over again. You may worry that you should “be over it by now” and that others won’t understand why it is still bothering you.
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It’s been a while.
I hope and pray that this message finds you well. Firstly, I thank you for your continued prayers and offerings as we seek God’s kingdom here on campus at Lincoln and in our neighborhood. We see the fruit of your prayers daily and even when we struggle, we know that it is your financial gifts that make much of what we do even possible, so thank you.
You’d probably like to know what we’ve been up to.
Leading from burden
One of my fears in life and ministry is that I don’t want to be bothered by God; I want things to come easy for me, for the dots to always connect and for the story to always have a happy ending. Am I alone in this?
Christians and culture
In 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life polled church leaders from around the world. Evangelical ministers from the United States reported a greater loss of influence than church leaders from any other country — with some 82 percent indicating that their movement was losing ground. This is a trend that has been happening for a while but most Christians were either to scared to admit it or had their heads in the sand. With the abuses in the church, the lack of constancy in our application of the Bible (i.e. Homosexuality greater sin than other sexual sins), and much more our culture has summarily dismissed the truths out of God’s word by looking at the people who claim to follow it.
Is it really murder?
A year or 2 back I remember reading an article that said something to the sort of Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion. This began a disturbing trend that came next to the Dr. Kermit Gosnell arrest and subsequent conviction but no real news of the horrors of this man. Next, I had the privileged of listening to Lila Grace Rose at a local banquet and her inspiring ministry for the unborn nationwide. Next, I watched as Rep. Wendy Davis (D) from Texas filibustered a bill, in some spiffy shoes I might add, that would have severely reduced and restricted access to abortions in Texas thus she became a quick celebrity on Pro-Choice circles.