Word: abrahamisms
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...Kennedy announces. "I have a dream," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declares as the world around him burns. Maybe the promise is realized, even surpassed; maybe it keeps receding, pulling us along. "The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time," Abraham Lincoln supposedly observed. Which is true for those in charge of creating it but maybe not for the rest of us. When we pause and look back, we get to see the past's future, know how the story turned out. Did we rise to the occasion? Did we triumph...
...Abraham to explore finding faith and God outside of the church? Abraham is such a fascinating figure. Three world religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - all claim him as a patriarch. He was raised in a religious home. And yet he rejected religion in order to pursue a personal relationship with...
...write about the fact that God ordered Abraham to leave behind his family, a command that Jesus gave his disciples as well. Do you believe that's still a requirement for following God's will? When Jesus says you must leave your family to follow him, he doesn't necessarily mean physically. He means leave your dependence on them, make an emotional break with them. For me, that meant I had to be willing to step outside the opinions of my parents when I started Bible Study Fellowship [a Bible school for laywomen in North Carolina...
...write that often instead of following God's will, people try to compromise by doing some of what they think they're supposed to while still staying within a comfort zone. You know, God sent Abraham to Canaan, but Abraham didn't go to Canaan - he stopped 200 miles out, in Haran. And it just didn't work. Compromising with God never does. There are a lot of people living in Haran. They call themselves Christians and they probably are, but they haven't gone all the way. It took Abraham 40 years to get to the point where...
What lesson do you draw from Abraham's story? Abraham wasn't perfect. He failed - a lot. He got into complicated situations because he did the wrong thing. But he never quit. Like him, I've made plenty of mistakes. There's this prosperity message out there today that tells people God blesses you by giving you a problem-free life. When life is good and we have no problems, we can almost let ourselves believe we have no need for God. But in my experience, sometimes the richest blessings come through pain and hard things...