A Friend Who Cares

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

He Digs Us

“Jesus hardly talked to anyone about what He’d done. The Bible never depicts one of those end-of-camp slideshows where Jesus goes over all He had done with His disciples. Instead Jesus modeled that we don’t need to talk about everything we’ve done. It’s like He was saying, what if we were just to do awesome stuff together while we’re here on earth and the fact that only He knew would be enough? If we did that, we wouldn’t get confused about who was really making things happen. Not surprisingly, we’d get a lot more done too, because we wouldn’t care whose looking or taking credit. All that energy would be funneled into awesomeness. Even then, though, don’t take the bait that if we do incredible things Jesus will dig us more. He can’t. He already digs us more. And more than that, our pictures are already in His wallet.” – Bob Goff, Love Does

Shhhh, listen

We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about hearing from God. We’ve explored the possibility, looked at how the concept has been misused and then concluded that it wouldn’t make sense for us to have a God that desires a personal relationship with us if He was unwilling to speak with us. We’ve touched on a number of things we can be sure we’re hearing from Him and even looked at some we can be sure are not being said by Him. The only thing left to do is listening. Let’s set some time aside today to quiet our minds, boot out those things we know are a distraction and see what we might hear from Him. He has things to share with you today.