We don't get brownie points for sacrificing more than God asks of us. So it's important that we take the time to understand what it is that God requires of us as workers in His kingdom, regarding the families that He has entrusted us with.
There's a special aspect to being a missionary in the Christian world that many missionaries don't share with others. In fact, we often don't talk about it between ourselves, or even spend time thinking about it privately.
It's the consideration of other people's opinions.
Today, I thought I’d write a short primer focussing on how to apologize to someone who's undergone deep trauma. I’ll examine this topic from a trauma-informed perspective, which will hopefully include a few helpful pointers along the way.
Along with the rest of Canada, we’ve recently heard anew of the horrors of the residential schools that went on for about 130 years. We’re sobered to hear that the last one closed only in 1996, and to realize that the last “graduates” of that school system are the same age as us.
Where is our moral outrage?
Under the church, the state separated children and parents in Canada for over 100 years. Under the church, men used their authority to abuse, destroy lives and even murder innocent children. Evil was safe under the church, the innocent were not.
“The Lord cannot fully bless a man until He has first conquered him. The degree of blessing enjoyed by any man will correspond exactly with the completeness of God’s victory over him.”
I must admit that, reading those words, I tend to cringe a little bit...
We just released two more videos on our YouTube channel (Tea with Valerie). On this channel, we talk about a variety of spiritual questions, and share Bible stories. Here is our second spiritual question:
Is Christianity really a Western religion?
I’ve started doing art based on sign language: tracing movement and stillness, repetition and collision in different shapes and colours.
As I think about the nature of the movement for the word “worship”, I realize that it contains a message for us...
Peter and I like to read the Bible together once a week. The other day, we came to Deuteronomy 1, which recounts the story of when the Israelites reached the Promised Land for the first time.