Encouraging and empowering people to live victorious lives in Christ

Archive for November, 2023

Are you resilient?


This past Sunday, I had the opportunity to be the worship leader at a church’s 127th anniversary (it was a great celebration!).  As I read the church’s history, I thought about the fact that over 127 years, the members of the church had to be resilient to continue the church’s work for all those years.  What does resiliency mean?  

One of the definitions of resiliency from Dictionary.com is “the ability of a person to adjust to or readily recover from illness, adversity, major life changes, etc.” I would imagine that over 127 years, the church faced many challenging times, and yet, they are still in existence today and fulfilling their mission!

What about you?  Each of us will face (or has faced) challenges and adversity. How do we handle them? Do we allow them to derail our goals and purpose, or are we resilient and “adjust to or readily recover” from them?  We have a choice in how we use what’s happened to us; we can choose to be stuck in the negative or we choose to use difficulties to make us better. I encourage you to choose the latter!

Use the past to learn lessons that can serve you in the future.  Use the past to remind you that if you survive one difficult experience that you can survive another one.  Use your memory of the past to remind you of how far you’ve come.  Then move forward with resiliency! 

Life happens to all of us, but we don’t have to allow it to stop us!  When I experienced challenges, I needed to pause for a little while to recover emotionally and mentally, but then I kept going.  It’s ok to pause…just don’t stop!

I hope this message helps you in whatever you may be facing. Resiliency is key to ensuring your success, even in the face of hard things.

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Are you leading with love?

There seems to be a lot of doctrinal debate going on in the Christian world lately. I won’t take the time to list what’s being discussed, but if you follow some Christian influencers, you know what some of the topics are.  While Christians will probably never agree on everything regarding doctrine, what saddens me is that some of the debaters are callous, mean and downright disrespectful as they attempt to make their cases.  They don’t seem to be leading with love.

We may feel strongly about what we believe is correct, and there is nothing wrong with that.  The fact is…none of us has all doctrine 100% correct!  None of us has a biblical text that is an exact copy of the original (because the original manuscripts were lost many centuries ago).  So, we may be missing it in some areas.  Just because we may not agree on some issues, does that mean we treat each other with contempt?  I think not!

Meanwhile, the world is watching us Christians debate among ourselves, displaying disunity.  What Jesus said in John 13:35 is appropriate here: 

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

How will the world know that we are true followers of Jesus?  By our love for one another!  Where we disagree, we can show love, extend grace and be patient with one another.  Since our goal is to win souls for the Kingdom of God, can we put our differences aside and work together to bring as many people to Heaven with us as we can?

I would love to hear your comments; feel free to share them below.

Let’s lead with love today!

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