Tag Archive - Guest Blogger

What’s Your Story – Faith

May 16, 2012 in Daily Devotionals, Dating & Relationships, The Church with 0 Comments

[Guest Post by Anonymous] – I’m going to call her Faith, to protect her identity and country.

She found a Christian program on her satellite receiver, watched, and called the telephone number on the screen, leaving a phone message in her language. For seven long minutes she poured out an absolute tirade. Faith used every filthy curse word imaginable:

“What are you people doing?! Why are you saying there are two gods, when there is only one God? You are all going to Hell! You are all evil!”

She slammed the phone down. A telephone counselor (whom I’ll call Niki) endured the entire message:

“It was so painful for me to listen. There was much anger and horrible language. But the Lord gave me a burden for her. I didn’t want to, but somehow I knew I needed to call her back.”

Although fearful, she dialed her number. The woman answered. Faith exploded:

“Who gave you the right to call me? I don’t want to talk to you.”

Although it was very difficult, the Lord gave Niki grace to listen and then to do something that she knows was of the Lord. Gently and lovingly, Niki said,

“I could tell by your message that you have been deeply hurt, that you needed to talk to someone.”

Niki spoke to her of the love of God. Again, Faith let her have it:

“What are you talking about? You don’t know love! Life is very hard for me. You haven’t any idea what I’m dealing with. Tell me, have you ever been raped by your own father at the age of five? Has your brother raped you? Has your husband slept with your best friend? Have you had a court take away your children from you? All this has happened to me.”

Then, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Niki said,

“God has put it in my heart to call you and tell you that He truly loves you and is there for you. He wants you to know that He won’t leave you. He won’t take your children away. He’s not going to hurt your body.”

At this, Faith broke down, and began to weep:

“I’m 28 years old. This is the first time I have been swearing at a person and they responded to me like you have. Why are you doing this? Why are you so kind to me?”

Niki said:

“This love is not from me. It’s from God. Please, may I help you to know the God who loves you so, the one that Pastor on the Christian station was telling you about on the program?”

Niki said that verses of Scripture began to flow from her lips. She knew that the Holy Spirit was speaking to Faith thousands of miles away, but through Niki. The once-angry woman took in every word…crying the entire time. Then she asked Niki for a Bible, which Niki arranged. Five days later Faith called back. She had been reading the Bible and was so peaceful. Again, they talked. After some minutes, Niki asked Faith if she would like to invite Jesus into her heart. She said yes and prayed with Niki. Immediately, Faith began declaring with joy,

“I’m free…I’m free…I’m free!”

She apologized for her language and anger, and could not stop talking about the joy, peace, and love she now felt. Faith has since called this Christian program several times. The last time saying:

“I’ve lost 28 years of my life, but now I’ve begun to live. I’m so happy…so happy that I found you, that I’ve come to know you. Thank you for giving me life, for introducing me to Jesus.”

Faith is but one of thousands who fear detection by the authorities, reprisals, and even jail time for sharing their story.

Instead, they view the programs with their doors closed, in the safety of their homes, taking it all in. Now is the time to P-R-A-Y for the Persecuted church for Christ! For those who are disillusioned, discouraged and depressed. Many stay home, not wanting to go out on the streets. Most turn to their televisions for news and hope, and particularly, satellite television from the outside.

What a wonderful door of opportunity to walk through, to give them hope, love and Christ…all to His glory.

[Photo courtesy of The Split Stitch]

What’s Your Story – Rayni

May 11, 2012 in Daily Devotionals with 1 Comment

[Guest Post] I’d never been afraid to fly. From the time I was a baby I’ve been flying on a regular basis. Even flying across the country a few months after 9/11 didn’t scare me because I trusted God with my life.

And then it happened.

Several years ago, out of nowhere, I began having anxiety attacks. Unfortunately two of them came back to back on a long plane ride overseas. It was a traumatic experience, to put it mildly. From that moment on stepping onto a plane was a trigger for extremely high and almost unbearable anxiety.

But, I have found that when I trust God and lean on Him, who is the only One truly in control, there is no room for anxiety.

On each intensely anxiety-filled flight I took after the “fateful” flight overseas, I asked God to come into my feeling of anxiety and dissipate it…to take it away.

Guess what?

Every single time He did it.

Sometimes I had to ask more than once because I was so worked up, but God has always been faithful to meet me in the midst of my anxiety and remove it. Because of this I know without a doubt that God will not fail me. Ever. But even with those victories I still had intense anxiety when approaching a flight.

I wanted the anxiety to be gone for good.

And then the Washington trip came.

The thought of having to get on a plane made me want to crawl into a hole and hide out. Forever.

My boyfriend Joel (now my husband) and I had plans to fly to visit his family. I wanted to cancel the trip…but I knew I had to go and that God would go with me. So I asked God to completely deliver me from this flying anxiety once and for all.

God requires our faith to have an action step.

I likened it to the Israelites in Joshua 3. God wants to lead them into a new place, but in order to get there they have to cross through the Jordan River, which happens to be in flood stage at the time. Minor detail, right? God tells Joshua to have the priests (who are literally carrying the presence of God in a box called the Ark of the Covenant) to take a few steps into the river and then He will make the flooding stop so all of the Israelites can cross to the other side.

“Now it was harvest season and the Jordan was overflowing its banks. But as soon as the feet of the priests who were carrying the Ark touched the water at the river’s edge, the water began piling up at a town upstream…Then all the people crossed over near the city of Jericho. Meanwhile, the priests who were carrying the Ark of the Lord’s covenant stood on dry ground in the middle of the riverbed as the people passed by them…until everyone had crossed the Jordan on dry ground.” (Joshua 3:15-17)

I love that it says that the people crossed over on dry ground. Not wet, muddy, soggy ground.

Dry ground.

As I walked toward the plane bound for Washington, full of anxiety, I asked God, as soon as I took the first steps onto the plane, to “pull the waters” of my anxiety back so I could “cross over” through the flight on dry ground.

And He did!

Two flights. No anxiety on either one. None. Coming from where I came from, that, my friends, is truly a miracle.

God’s deliverance!

What are you struggling with today?

God desires to meet us in the midst of every large and small burden we experience. Invite Jesus into it and ask Him to deliver you. Sometimes the journey is scary or painful but God’s deliverance and freedom are worth every step!

Over the past 15 years Rayni has discovered that nothing is better than knowing Jesus! She has enjoyed working at churches on the East and West Coasts as a Bible teacher, mentor to young adults and an event coordinator. In her free time Rayni likes staring at the ocean, exploring new cuisine with her “foodie” husband and learning to speak French. You can read more on her website www.RayniPeavy.com and follow her on Twitter.

What’s Your Story – Ashley

May 9, 2012 in Daily Devotionals, Dating & Relationships, The Church with 2 Comments

[Guest Post] I always had a close relationship with God, and felt I could always lean on Him.

In high school, I got a job at a leather store in the mall. I was a trainer on the football team and fell head over heels for popular guy on the team. I had my whole life planned out. I wanted to be a stay at home mom and be an active part of a church.

I knew I wanted to save myself for marriage, but I started to drift from God. He wasn’t into going to church or praying. I ended up dating him and we had a child born out of wedlock. We were engaged for about three years.

I wanted to join a church that I had been visiting, so I went down to the altar and spoke with a deacon. A few days later, I got a call from the membership Pastor at the church. He invited us into his office for a meeting. He advised that the church wouldn’t allow me to become a member unless we were married. I was embarrassed and ashamed.

I didn’t go back to church for almost 2 months when I finally talked him into getting married so I could be a part of that church.  

We got married, and things were already headed down hill. I had been a stay at home mom and recently had a got a part time job at a local retail store. He had started gambling and taking pain pills on top of his marijuana addiction. His six figure income supported his habits. The days continued to get worse.

He would come home late at night drunk and had been spending time after work at bars and strip clubs. I became depressed. I felt ugly on the inside and the outside.

Why wasn’t I beautiful anymore?  

Why didn’t he want to spend time with me?  

One night in our kitchen, I prayed over him as he was trying to crush a pill to snort. He was so angry that I put my hand over a line of pills that he had crushed, then he put me in a headlock that took me to the floor. I pleaded for him to let me go…He snorted the pill in front of me off the kitchen counter.

I was devastated.  

He took off to the bedroom and said he was leaving. I begged him to stay and talk.

He pulled out a gun and put it to my head and pushed me to the floor.

He yelled some profanities and took off out the door. I opened the door and yelled that I was calling the police. He came back up the steps with the gun and told me he was going to kill me. I kept locking the door as he was unlocking with his key. I prayed for God to please let me survive. I made it, and so did my son. It was a miracle that he slept through all the commotion.

I didn’t leave the marriage.

I thought I was doing the right thing. He would tell me that I had broken my vows because I was trying to leave him while he was sick (drugs were making him sick), and that I had promised to love him in sickness and in health.

At this point, I had taken on a job with a good company and could support myself and my son. My brother was very close to me, and he had been staying the night with us a lot and he could keep the arguments down at the house. I never told him about what he had done to me, but he knew something was up.

A few months after the gun incident, we took my son to a baseball game and came home to find my brother had passed away in his sleep on my couch.  

My three year old son and I had found him. This was the most devastating thing that has ever happened to me.

I wanted to know where God was and why was He letting this happen to me?

I tried counseling and buying books on how to save your marriage. It was the end.

He didn’t want to be a part of our lives.  

Drugs was his life.  

I had been reading in Job and all the trials he experienced. This is where I gained my strength and renewed my trust in the Lord. I attended Celebrate Recovery at my church, where I learned how to deal with my codependent nature. God had given me little signs in the form of hearts, that made me realize that He was beside me each step of the way.

I decided I needed to divorce.

My son and I had moved in with my parents. I reconnected with my boss from the leather store, and we began dating. We both were single parents with ex spouses who didn’t seem to care about anyone but themselves. We both had a strong Christian background. He proposed to me last year and we ended up marrying a few months later. May 14th is our one year anniversary!!

I can say that I am thankful for the trials that I went through to make it where I am today.

I have a wonderful, loving husband that prays with me and keeps me positive. He is a great father figure to my son. He works hard every day to provide for all of us. I stayed true to God during all my sufferings, and He comforted me. He blessed me with the greatest husband ever. I cannot wait to bow at His feet and thank Him for the many blessings He has bestowed upon me.  My best advice is to keep holding onto your faith when everything else is falling apart.

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:2-4).

Ashley is a 28 year old mom of an 8 year old, and a step mom to a 15 year old. I enjoy Bible study and love spending an immense amount of time with my husband and kids. Over the past year, I have learned a lot about marriage. I now understand why it is important to be married to someone with the same beliefs. It is also an amazing feeling when you spouse prays for you. Connect with Ashleigh on Twitter.

Singleness Is NOT A Disease

April 10, 2012 in Dating & Relationships, On Writing with 8 Comments

[Guest Post] American culture values independence.

Somewhere between my twenty-fifth and twenty-seventh birthdays, my status as a single man in the church downgraded from laudable to questionable. People stopped celebrating my singleness as a gift affording me undivided focus on performing God’s will (see I Corinthians 7) and began seeing it as a problem. They also began analyzing why I had failed to solve it. The message was clear: My “malady” of being single was somehow my fault.

It wasn’t anything I did.

It was what I didn’t do enough of.

I didn’t do enough to prove my independence.

American men who cannot demonstrate enough independence begin to feel weak and undesirable. Once we hit twenty-five, any failure to become fully independent becomes pronounced—especially for men in the church.

Unless you are able to buy a house and afford to live in it by yourself, you might as well wear a sign on you that says, “Not suitable for marriage.”

At twenty-five, I was working my way through graduate school, driving a car that was held together by prayer, and living with a gracious family from my church. I was anything but independent, and I felt like a total failure. Then I visited Argentina the summer before my last year of graduate school.

In Argentina, all my presumptions about independence and manhood were challenged. I noticed how many of the single men or women lived with their families well into their twenties and thirties. They simply didn’t value independence the way I did.

The experience caused me to reexamine what the Bible has to say about independence.

I found out that God doesn’t like it nearly as much as his American children do. He’s into something quite different: interdependence. Why? Because it’s a reflection of his own mutually dependent, three-gods-in-one, nature. As early on as Genesis 2:18, God tells us it’s not good for a man to be alone (and lest you ladies think that doesn’t apply to you, the word for “man” here can also be translated as “human”). In Psalm 68:6, God tells us that he sets the solitary in families. In I Corinthians 12, we are given a lovely metaphor of the church as a body that can’t function unless each part works interdependently. Through scripture, the value on interdependence is upheld as God’s best for us all.

Independence can get ugly.

It promotes loneliness and teaches us to judge those who can’t make it on their own. It teaches us to never ask for help for fear we’ll appear weak. It prevents us from receiving God’s blessings that come through others. In contrast, interdependence is beautiful. It keeps us from staying lonely and builds compassion into our hearts.

When I learned to embrace interdependence as the cultural value of God’s kingdom, much of my frustration as an “old” single man faded away.

It didn’t change the fact that I was single.

It didn’t change how people treated me.

But it did change me.

So where does that leave you? Are you still striving after independence or have you embraced the kingdom value of interdependence? Do you even know where to start? Lest I leave you empty-handed, let me offer you some parting suggestions:

+Commit to a small group. Almost every church has them these days. Some churches are basically nothing more than networked small groups. As nice as Sunday morning worship services are, you can’t really experience interdependence in larger groups.

+Live in community, not alone. Remember that God sets the solitary in families. This doesn’t mean you should move back in with Mom and Dad, but you should consider finding people to occupy your extra rooms or seek to occupy someone else’s empty room.

+Borrow stuff (and share it, too). Have you ever wasted money on purchasing something you needed to use only once? Could you have borrowed that item from a friend? Independently minded people don’t even think to ask others about borrowing their stuff, and they don’t like lending it. That’s a far cry from the fine folks in Acts 4:32 who “had everything in common.”

+Become a people gatherer. Host events that promote interaction: Bible studies, potlucks, book clubs, game nights, etc. And don’t just invite your single friends. Married people need interdependence, too.

Vinnie Kinsella is in his early thirties and single, which makes him the male equivalent of a spinster by many churches’ standards. He works in the book publishing industry as a book editor and a consultant to independent publishers. He also teaches editing workshops and college classes in and around Portland, Oregon. If you ask him what he feels God has called him to do, he’ll look you square in the eye and say he’s already doing it.

Marc’s Thoughts on Dating

February 6, 2012 in Dating & Relationships with 1 Comment

My husband and I were discussing the release of my book. I happened to ask him what his thoughts were on dating. He said he’d have to think about it, and knowing my husband, I knew he’d come up with something deep.

Here are Marc’s 5 Thoughts on Dating:

“If you pressed me to provide thoughts on dating you might be surprised on how little I would have to say. Of course men do not think in the same ways women do about these matters.

Most of us guys have not dreamed about marriage since we were young, constantly thought about our knightness in shining armor, or kept a notebook of our wedding plans over the years.

But it isn’t to say that at times we do long for the love and companionship of marriage. It isn’t to say we don’t also experience loneliness, have desires of the flesh to deal with, our inadequacies, and societies lies to face.

The love story God wrote between Renee and I is certainly only something He could have planned, but at the same time our story is not perfect either.

The end result is an incredible marriage with my beautiful bride, but in talking about dating–I think there is more to be said on the process than the end result that we all focus on.

I’m not going to debate whether dating is even Biblical, call it courtship if that helps, but it is a question of the heart ultimately. So in dating, I wanted to talk about the five most important things I learned, which if I ever have children I would hope to pass on to them.

1) God Is Not Wanting You To Obtain A Physical Relationship From Dating

For men, in our current society, this cannot be stressed enough. We are tempted with lust all the time–even in situations we would never expect it. For women out there, before you go placing any man on a pedestal let me throw this out, if you knew just the thoughts of our mind over the course of our lifetime you would never speak to us again.

In dating, be open about your own struggles, never place temptation in the situation, and never place a boundary on how careful you need to be.

Purity is at stake and therefore if you truly care about the person you are dating you ought to be willing to forgo any and all physical touch and even talk in the pursuit of purity. I’m not saying holding hands means you going to hell, or that I have some checklist that is to be applied anybody dating, but the purity of the relationship should never be in question. Watch for this in the person you are dating to. Let the words of Jesus be a constant in your relationship, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

And remember that you are not perfect and neither is the person you are with. Pursue purity in your relationship, and if mistakes are made, find grace in the Redeemer and be graceful to one another. If they become habitual you have another problem…

2) See Beauty Of The Creator In The Creation

As men we often form pictures for ourselves of what beauty is. We focus too much on appearance and all around us society is trying to paint it’s perverted picture of beauty for us.

Beauty is proportionate to the image of the Creator as reflected in the creation.

It took me a long time in life before I finally saw the beauty of Christ, and how much more it was to be desired than the twisted idea of beauty I had formed. I needed that before I could pursue a relationship in any godly way. For any guys who have no idea about the beauty of Christ–be on your knees often in seeking to find it. Be careful before you pursue a dating relationship without knowing it.

3) Holiness

Not just physical, but in all aspects do you love holiness? If not, you do not belong in a dating relationship.

Does the person you are with love holiness? If not, it is time to end the relationship.

If a mutual love for holiness does not exist–troubles will follow. And remember legalism is not a love for holiness. I saw this in Renee during our months of dating. This is a day to day, even moment to moment thing, but we challenge each other in this, sometimes in words and others just in actions. My advice is to make it a habit to pray for the person you are dating, and learn to pray together.

4) Speaking About The Weather Reveals Shallowness

Most people spend the majority of their time together speaking about the most useless of topics.

You will speak most about that which consumes your heart most, is it Jesus Christ?

Listen carefully to the person you are with, what comes out of their mouth most reflects their heart’s greatest passion. I would encourage you to be involved in a Bible study with the person you are dating, even better if just the two of you. Let their love or lack of love for the things of God be revealed. It also will reveal how much they cherish the words of God, and if they are concerned enough to really study each and every word.

5) Love Is Only Possible If Preceded By Death

This is something I am still learning day by day. Men need to learn this just as much as women.

Your pride, your ego, your ambitions, your “needs”, your opinions, and all that follows must be dying daily.

We see it all the time in media–once you’re married you will fight, and that is normal. A normal marriage relationship is not filled with fighting.

I hate to burst that myth for you. A normal marriage relationship is two people who are daily dying so that the other might live.

Two people who can love selflessly because they have first died. If this isn’t there in dating–then watch out!

We miss a truth in Scripture, unless Christ lives in you–you are not capable of truly loving.

This should shock society, that those who are unsaved love through a selfish love and not a self-less love. Death is first required before a real and genuine love that makes no room for self is birthed into the equation. Is the person you are dating really dying to self or capable of it? What about yourself?”

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