All posts by Betsy

Why I Changed My Mind About Fundraising for Our Church Plant

fundraising

A couple of years ago, my husband and I were in the thick of fundraising for our church plant. We were a few months away from launching, and it seemed we spent all our time writing letters and thank-you notes, and organizing gatherings where we’d invite people to invest in our church.

Our situation going into fundraising was not ideal, in that we were in a bit of a time crunch. Our New York apartment was too small for a house-church meeting, so we needed to rent meeting space right from the beginning. We didn’t want to delay our launch, because we feared we’d lose the people who’d already indicated interest in our church, most of whom were recent arrivals to Manhattan. Read the rest at TGC.

Trading Anxiety for Patience

pw-blog-barthel_eDNDQuCFew things make me more anxious than getting off schedule. I have a strong internal clock, which is a blessing when it comes to getting places on time. But when I’m in a meeting or at an event that falls increasingly behind schedule, my internal clock is a curse. It’s an alarm that goes off inside me, raising my blood pressure and anxiety. I lose the ability to focus on what other people are saying because all I can think about is how in the world we might get back on schedule.

Even if you’re not someone who gets as uptight about schedules as I do, you may have feltat some point that your life is off schedule. Maybe you’ve ended a multiyear dating relationship that didn’t culminate in marriage. Perhaps you are facing financial difficulties when you expected to be entering retirement. Most of us have a rough idea in our minds of a schedule for our life. If we get derailed from that schedule, anxiety strikes. We feel we must do something to get our lives back on track. Read the rest at Crossway.

The Weight of ‘The Crown’

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In my wildest dreams, I will one day have an occasion to wear a tiara. Not beauty-pageant costume jewelry, mind you. Diamonds. Watching Netflix’s The Crown, a long and lavish drama based on the life of Queen Elizabeth II, is probably the closest I’ll get, and season two releases this week.

This has been a long, strange year, and I’m ready to lose myself in Christmas at Sandringham. Yes, British palaces may be drafty, but there’s always a servant close by to stoke the fire and bring the tea.

Though the show is rumored to have cost $200 million, showrunner and executive producer Peter Morgan has said the budget figure is closer to $130 million for both seasons of The Crown thus far. Netflix flaunts its humongous production budget in every episode. Yet while there is no lack of wealth or creature comforts on display, one gets the sense that we are meant to sympathize with the royal family rather than envy them. It seems the adage, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” is no less true in a constitutional monarchy than in Shakespeare’s day. Read the rest at The Gospel Coalition.

When You Don’t Need God’s Guidance

Helen_RoseveareDr. Helen Roseveare was a medical missionary to the Congo between 1953 and 1973. She passed away last December at the age of 91 and left behind a rich store of thoughtful writing about her experiences.

A single woman, far from her home in England, she frequently sought guidance from the Lord.

When war broke out in the Congo, should she stay or retreat across the border to safety? When funds ran out, should she continue in faith that God would provide by the time bills were due? When her will conflicted with that of other missionaries, should she stand her ground for what she thought best or humbly back down? These sorts of decisions kept her in her Bible and on her knees, searching for guidance.  Read the rest at The Gospel Coalition.

 

The Underground Railroad—Reimagining America’s Ugly Past

Underground RailroadWhy do we read fiction? Most often it’s for pleasure or escape. It does us good to get caught up in someone else’s story. But fiction also has the power to shape our moral imaginations. It increases empathy and allows us to experience emotionally the outworking of choices we haven’t made or tragedies we haven’t suffered.

Some novels lean so heavily toward the purpose of molding reader sympathies that they forsake any pretense of giving pleasure. The Underground Railroad: A Novel by Colson Whitehead was this sort of book. I steeled myself for it the way I do before reading about the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church or the Rwandan genocide. Sometimes we must look with open eyes at the evil humans can perpetrate themselves or countenance in others.

Read the rest of the review at The Gospel Coalition.

Waiting for More than Christmas

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The season of Advent brings with it pleasing rituals of happy anticipation. Open a door on the Advent calendar and find a piece of chocolate. Light a candle in the Advent wreath and know you are one week closer to Christmas. Make your lists and check them twice as you look forward to giving, receiving, and feasting.

The waiting that comes with Advent is fun because it’s finite. We know what’s coming at the end of our wait will be good, and we know exactly how many days we have left to wait for it.

But much of the waiting that occupies our lives is open-ended. We wait for love and marriage without knowing if it will come. We wait for children without knowing whether we will conceive. We wait for justice. We wait for healing.

The hardest thing about waiting is not knowing when it’s going to end, if it is going to end. Waiting brings questions without easy answers. If your life’s plans aren’t coming to fruition, should you change course or hold out for your heart’s desire? Are your unfulfilled yearnings indicators of sinful discontentment, or blessings God simply hasn’t yet fulfilled? Read the rest at Crossway’s blog.

The Struggle of Rejoicing with Those Who Rejoice

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Wedding invitations. Christmas card photos of smiling, intact families and lots of healthy grandchildren. Baby announcements. Shower invitations.

You may not think of opening your mail as a prime time for temptation, but it can be if your life has not panned out exactly the way you hoped it would. When confronted with all the evidence of others’ blessings, it can be hard to obey God’s command to “rejoice with those who rejoice” (Rom. 12:15).

At face value, this should be an easy command to obey. Who doesn’t want to be happy for other people? But when year after year has brought disappointment after disappointment, bitterness is the natural reaction to another person’s joy. That’s why God gave us the command, because rejoicing in another person’s joy doesn’t always come to us naturally. It’s a step of obedience that must be taken by faith.

So how do we get from resentment to rejoicing with those who rejoice? Read the rest at Revive Our Hearts.

When God Asks Too Much

when-god-asks-too-muchI feel for Elijah. It wasn’t easy being the prophet of Yahweh under the reign of Ahab. We’re told the king “did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him” (1 Kings 16:30). Elijah starts his prophetic ministry by bringing the unwelcome news that Israel would suffer a drought, which would not be removed until Elijah said so (1 Kings 17). This puts the prophet in immediate danger. Far from holding himself and his evildoing responsible for the drought, Ahab considers Elijah the “troubler of Israel” (1 Kings 18:17).

God protects Elijah by sending him to live by a brook east of the Jordan River. He provides food by sending Elijah ravens bearing bread and meat. It’s as if God is tangibly showing Elijah that although he had delivered a hard word and the king sought to take his life, Elijah is under the tender care of his God.

Then the brook dries up. The land is in drought, after all. God commands Elijah to leave the comfort of his brook and ravens and journey into Zarephath—pagan country—where a widow will feed him.

The widow he finds there has little to offer; she tells Elijah she has some flour and oil, enough to make one cake, but once that’s gone she expects she and her son will starve to death. Elijah audaciously asks her to make him a cake anyway. But he promises that her jug of oil and her flour in the jar won’t run out until Yahweh sends rain. The widow believes him, and God miraculously keeps Elijah’s promise. Elijah and the widow’s household survive for days on one jar of flour and one jug of oil.

Yet although the oil doesn’t run out, Elijah faces another test of faith when the widow’s son falls ill and dies. Why would God protect them from starvation only to allow the child to get sick and die? It’s too much, I say to myself, when I read this. God is asking too much of Elijah and the widow. Read the rest at The Gospel Coalition.

Waiting on the Prodigal Spouse or Child You Love

waiting on a prodigal

Lynn and her husband had been married for 12 years when she started to realize there was something re­ally wrong with her marriage. She didn’t suspect an affair at first because she couldn’t believe her husband, a professing Christian, would violate his marriage vows. He was a doctor and often worked late, but one Christmas Eve, he didn’t come home at all.

That Christmas was the start of years of unfaithfulness, sepa­rations, and attempts at reconciliation. Lynn’s husband would lie about his affairs, making it nearly impossible to tell when, if ever, his repentance was real. Lynn vividly recalls sitting with him at a coffee shop where he asked her to forgive him for his infidelity, all the while knowing his plan after leaving was to go and sleep with another woman.

Lynn prayed for her husband to repent. They went through hundreds of hours of counseling sessions. She could have divorced him early on, but her heart’s desire was for their relationship to be restored and their family made whole. She didn’t just want him to stop having affairs and start living an upright life. She longed to know his heart. Bt he didn’t want to be known. Instead, he betrayed her again and again.

Read the rest at The Gospel Coalition.

You Can’t Buy Manna at Costco

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One of my favorite Bible stories is God’s provision of bread in the wilderness. The Israelites grumbled because they had no food, so God gave them manna from heaven. The flaky food would appear on the ground in the morning. They could gather as much as they liked, but it didn’t do any good to store it up. With the exception of the Sabbath eve when they were allowed to gather the next day’s portion, if they kept manna overnight it became full of worms with a terrible smell. I’m sure they didn’t make that mistake more than a couple of times.

It may have taken a while for the children of Israel to trust that the manna would be there the next morning. They had to adjust to going to bed with full stomachs but empty cupboards. You might have thought that once they learned the lesson, God would have started feeding them some other way, but Exodus 16:35 says: “The people of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land. They ate the manna till they came to the border of the land of Canaan.”

One Day at a Time

It’s a great feeling when you can stock up on food and paper products at a wholesale store and know you won’t have to go back for months. But God doesn’t allow us to stock up on his grace. He gives it to us one day at a time, just as he gave his people manna. And just as they waited for daily bread for 40 years, we wait on daily grace for a lifetime.

You see, once you start walking in daily dependence on God, you have to keep walking in it. God’s desire is to be in fellow­ship with us, and one way he draws us into that fellowship is by meeting our needs one day at a time. He doesn’t just give us what we need; he wants to give us himself. He gives us himself through his Word. The trials that make us crave the life-giving sustenance of the daily nourishment of Scripture are like the hunger pains that drive us to the daily food our bodies need to survive.

Your needs for today may not be all that daunting, but the thought of what it will take to persevere for a lifetime can be overwhelming. Maybe singleness isn’t so bad today, but can you bear it for the rest of your life? Maybe you have peace in the face of your cancer diagnosis, but where will you get the strength to cope with seemingly endless cycles of chemotherapy?

Read the rest at The Gospel Coalition