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Please, Mind the Gap

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  My husband and I recently took our daughter to Europe as a college graduation present.  We used London’s subway system, The Tube, to get everywhere we went.  Each time the doors got ready to open, a female voice sporting a friendly British accent kindly reminded passengers, “Please mind the gap” to keep them from falling and getting injured. All week, we found much humor in doing impressions of the announcement in our lame British accents.  My husband even bought a Mind the Gap t-shirt to avoid forgetting this iconic expression. While I transferred his t-shirt from the washer to the dryer recently, I realized my life once included a much more dangerous gap than the one reflected by the words on my husband’s souvenir. This threatening gap held the potential to keep me permanently separated from my Creator who longs to give me eternal life. The cold, hard truth is that God is righteous and I am not. Because of this, an expansive gap, known as my fleshly sinful nature, stood between
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Inconceivable

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  Losing Dalton has been brutal, no doubt about it. I didn’t get a choice. But if I had, I would’ve never willingly sacrificed him for the needs of others. In fact, I’ve spent much of the last (almost) 4 years kicking, screaming, and pounding my fists on the ground in protest of my unimaginable loss.  And that’s what makes this next statement so inconceivable. God did exactly this. He willingly sacrificed His One and Only Son for the needs of every human. But He wasn’t just willing. He even went so far as to devise the plan.  A plan that would require His Son to innocently hang and painfully die on a cross. For me.  For you.  For all humanity. I would NEVER, not even for a millisecond, consider such an act. God knew what Jesus had to endure.  He witnessed every last injustice committed against His Son. Jesus was: Falsely accused. Spit upon. Brutally beaten. Rejected. Humiliated. Mocked. Betrayed. Devalued. Pierced. Murdered. And because this mission was completed, Christ rescued us by
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Lessons On Prayer: Talking to God When Your Heart Is Broken

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  Prayer in the midst of deep loss and suffering can feel challenging, confusing, and even impossible in some cases.   Recently, a deacon at my church shared his testimony about the faithfulness of God in answering his bold, intentional prayers related to the health of a loved one.  There is no doubt that God hears every prayer we offer. Tension arises, however, when circumstances occur in life that don’t line up with what we expect from the God we always touted as good, faithful, and loving.   Throughout that service, God was nudging me to share my testimony as a follow-up to the truths expressed by this fellow believer. Our experiences are far from contradictory. In fact, they complement each other by validating how God reveals Himself and His character through our prayers in every circumstance of life, including those of joy and yes, even sorrow.   God has three types of responses to our requests.  Sometimes His reply is yes, which feels really uplifting to our human hearts.  A res
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