While meeting with a group of co-workers in Singapore, I looked out a seventh-story window and noticed a pile of huge, concrete blocks. When I asked about it, a colleague gave me some background. He said that since Singapore is a city-state built on an island, it is a common practice to test the stability […]
Your responses to the previous question have been so good! Let me see if I can pull our thoughts together and move us a bit further. Together, we have found a man named Job at the end of his moral and mental sanity. His stature as the wealthiest, most influential, and most blessed man in […]
Today is a national American holiday that reminds us to give thanks to the God of the harvest. Yet the season of Thanksgiving often turns into an occasion to express personal gratefulness at the expense of someone else. What I’m wondering is whether it is possible to publicly give thanks to God in a way […]
After surviving the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, Elie Wiesel wrote a novel titled The Trial of God. Reflecting Wiesel’s own crisis of faith, he created a character who accuses God of “hostility, cruelty, and indifference” for silently turning His back on His people in their time of need. In this plot, the only one […]
The counsel of the Bible can sound contrary to all reason—and against our best interests—while showing us the meaning of wisdom. For instance, the Apostle James says something that could sound more like mental illness than spiritual health. He encourages his readers to “count it all joy when they fall into various kinds of trials […]
In “How the Mighty Fall,” author Jim Collins analyzes how once successful corporations cycle through predictable patterns of decline. In his analysis, problems begin when companies take their success for granted and begin to stray from what worked for them in the past. Collins goes on to say the tendency is for managers to overextend […]
As Satan gloats over the progress of his rebellion, God asks, “Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?” (Job 1:8). So I find myself absorbed in the memoirs of Job. What made him such a […]
FOR 50 YEARS, cartoonist Charles Schulz gave us pictures of ourselves wrapped in a smile. One of the last strips I clipped from our Sunday paper showed Snoopy the dog sitting on top of his doghouse with a typewriter, writing about his life. He titled his story . . . The Dog Who Never Did […]
There are reasons so many of us struggle to “forgive” a God who seems to have wronged us. The life he gave us isn’t fair. Helpless children suffer for their parents’ mistakes. Some who work hard are cut down prematurely by accident or disease. Others who hardly work at all inherit the wealth of someone […]
I don’t know of anyone who would say that God has broken his own rules. But neither do I know anyone who hasn’t had issues with God. As a number of us have already acknowledged, when we talk about our struggle to “forgive God” we don’t really mean we think God has sinned against us. […]
