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Blog postGod.
Some days, we simply aren’t sure.
We’re not sure our contribution matters.
We’re not sure our skills are enough.
We’re not sure we’ll have what we need for the conversations and the procedures and the challenges and the uncertainty in front of us.
But we are doing work that matters.
God, we have responsibility for the care of the people in front of us. And we have the opportunity to serve everyone they, and we, are connected to.
Give us wisdom -
Blog postGod.
The easiest thing in the world is to get frustrated.
To get frustrated with ourselves
when we can’t do what we think we know how to do.
To get frustrated with others
when they don’t do what we think they should.
To get frustrated with you
when you don’t fix what we think you should.
When we’re stretched thin with fatigue and worry, it’s harder to stay encouraged.
So today, I ask you to encourage our hearts.
Even when others -
Blog postA reminder from Rich Dixon:
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Too frequently, I forget.
I do the reading, I talk to Jesus, but life intrudes. COVID’s insidious rampage continues – so much avoidable death, grief, and division. Unprecedented storms and fires – lives uprooted, homes and businesses lost.
Yeah, I could turn it all off, pretend it’s not there. From the relative safety and seclusion of middle-class USA suburbia, I have the privilege of mostly ignoring pandemics, human trafficking, -
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Blog postGod.
Isaiah describes buds and flowers and singing hills and clapping trees, and people walking into the middle of it with joy and peace.
And we think about it for a moment and say, “That would be nice.”
We sigh.
And then we turn from the Bible app to the Facebook app, and we are lost in the worry and the comparisons and the expectations and the condemnation.
We take barely a moment to consider the words you speak before we are inund -
Blog postGod.
I think we are all like Paul some days.
What we want to do, we don’t do. What we don’t want to do, we do.
I know, God, that Paul wasn’t talking about fitness goals or writing goals. He wasn’t talking about mid-year resolutions.
He was talking about doing good and doing bad.
“I want to be kind to people who disagree, but when she says those things, I just want to scream at her.”
“I want to love my brother, but when my spiritual brother does foo -
Blog postGod.
You are reading Facebook.
Or maybe James and Solomon were as they wrote about the destructive power of spoken words.
“How long will mockers delight in mockery?” wisdom says. “How long will fools hate knowledge?”
“Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark,” James says. “The tongue is also a fire. It sets the whole course of one’s life on fire.”
Thousands of years later, we are burning down careers, destroying families, despising one -
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Blog postGod.
We need you.
We need something or someone to anchor us.
We need something or someone to steady us.
We need something or someone to stop changing all the time.
Because everyone and everything is changing all the time.
We are fretting. On account of evil doers.
And we aren’t sure who the evil doers are anymore.
Because the people we thought we should trust, those in charge, those who you gave charge to, are fully human.
Are they scheming o -
Blog postGod.
We are constantly aware of numbers.
How many cases, how many shifts,
What trends, what patterns, what curve.
How many and how much and how often build our anxiety and intensity,
sometimes so much that we cannot put one thought with another.
Sometimes so much that we cannot put one conversation with another,
one breath with another.
We are grateful for our co-workers, God, who understand the numbers.
We are grateful for our leaders who -
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Blog postMore from Rich Dixon
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As numbers spike, as “front line workers” find themselves stretched too thin in every direction again, as temporary morgues appear again, as we wonder how this can possibly be happening again, we shake our heads and whisper, “I can’t imagine.”
Maybe you follow Jon on Facebook. Maybe you know he describes what it’s like to walk hospital halls as a chaplain each day, to offer comfort to those in ICU and patient rooms. Maybe you know he watches an -
Blog postGod.
We wonder all the time why things happen.
Mostly, we wonder why bad things happen.
Good things like flowers happen, and we are glad. We seldom wonder what we did to deserve them. We often think we worked to earn them.
But bad things, like pandemics and accidents and heart illness and cancer and job loss, those things we wonder about.
We wonder what we did wrong.
We wonder what you are doing wrong.
We wonder what you might want in order to do -
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Titles By Jon Swanson
God. We Still Need You.: A Year of Pandemic Prayer and Practice From a Hospital Chaplain
Mar 23, 2021
by
Jon Swanson
$5.99
Other Formats:
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This Is Hard: What I Say When Loved Ones Die. (Resources on Faith, Sickness, Grief and Doubt Book 6)
Apr 23, 2021
by
Jon Swanson
$0.99
Other Formats:
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A Great Work: A Conversation With Nehemiah For People (Who Want To Be) Doing Great Works
Nov 29, 2013
by
Jon Swanson
$0.99
Other Formats:
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"God. We Need You.": A Year of Prayer in a Hospital Chapel (Resources on Faith, Sickness, Grief and Doubt Book 5)
Jun 21, 2020
by
Jon Swanson
$0.99
Other Formats:
Paperback
