Ten Things I Learned While Studying Racial Reconciliation by Dan Van Ness

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Ten Things I Learned While Studying Racial Reconciliation by Dan Van Ness

I recently participated in a 12-week Study on racial history, healing, and reconciliation. It was sponsored by the Racial Reconciliation Group (RRG), an informal collection of people initially made up of members of churches in the Northern Virginia area, but with the pandemic forcing them to use Zoom, increasingly from churches across the country. There were roughly the same number of Black people and white people participating.

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Quieting

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Quieting

Today we are going to talk about quieting—the practice of purposefully lowering our energy levels so we can calm and be still. This can take many forms. It can be as simple as relaxing our bodies and being still before the Lord—waiting on him in peace. It can be a pause after a high energy activity or conversation. Our pause can be less than a minute or several days as we move into the practice of solitude. It is a huge subject that I will only touch on here. The best way to learn the value of quieting is to experience it.

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Ruthlessly Eradicate Hurry from Your Life

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Ruthlessly Eradicate Hurry from Your Life

Yep. You read that right. “Ruthlessly eradicate hurry from your life.” This pithy quote is a favorite of mine from the inestimable Dallas Willard. Hurry is a towering barrier to the life God has for us. Sadly, many of us, in the words of Richard Foster, quoting Thomas Kelly, “We live so much of our lives in ‘an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.’”. Some of us are perpetually in a hurry. We might even think that hurrying is good, because in our perception, when we hurry, we can squeeze in one more thing. And isn’t that the object of life, to get more done? To accomplish more?

Well, no. It is not. We are creatures made by God to love and to be loved.

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual Growth in 2022: Learn to Recognize When You Are Triggered

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual Growth in 2022: Learn to Recognize When You Are Triggered

It is no fun being triggered, but there is something far worse: Being triggered and not knowing that you are triggered. Being blind to triggers can end friendships and marriages and cause great suffering for both you and the ones you love. This is because if you don’t recognize that some of your upset is your stuff, you won’t see that there is something you can do about it.

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Adding a Spiritual Exercise

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Adding a Spiritual Exercise

It is hard to change, especially as we age. We tend to get in a rut and stay there. However, there are things we can do to keep our brains active and flexible. One of them is to increase cognitive effort by doing something new at work or home, such as learning a new skill. In today’s blog, I am going to describe three spiritual practices that you can add to your daily rhythms that will help you grow spiritually as well as help your brain by giving you a new skill to master in 2022.

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I Want to be a Community Elder

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I Want to be a Community Elder

At the beginning of each new year, our Healing Center International community habitually looks to see where God has been at work over the past year and asks him what he desires for us and where he is inviting us to join him in the coming year. Not only as a community habit, but also as a personal habit, I began seeking God and interacting with him on his dreams and desires for me for this coming year. Unexpectedly to me—not to him—I found I had a desire to become a community elder, a community guide.

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Eight Things I Want You to Know About the Eschaton!

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Eight Things I Want You to Know About the Eschaton!

More than two thousand years ago, God the Father sent his son to earth to take on human flesh. In that moment, he who is fully God became also fully man. Advent, the season when we celebrate this miraculous event started this year on November 28th and will continue through Christmas Eve. We are grateful to God for his mercy in reaching out to us in our broken humanity, for living among us, and for dying for our sins. We celebrate his resurrection.

Most Christians know about these wonders. But if you are like most believers, you don’t know much about eschatology, when history ends, and Christ comes again. Advent celebrates both, the first coming of Christ as a babe in the manger as well as the second coming of Christ.

It’s important to know about eschatology because there are so many misconceptions presented in popular literature. There, the authors (I assume) tried to fill in the blanks with exciting fiction, but to be honest, there is quite a bit we don’t know . . . yet. But if we learn what is known, we will recognize the eschaton it when it happens.

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Gratitude in Community

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Gratitude in Community

The calendar page has turned to November. Thanksgiving plans are being made, and the Christmas season approaches. This is the time of year most of us naturally turn our attention toward gratitude. And with good reason. Not only do we celebrate Thanksgiving; but we are entering into a season of gift giving, and everyone knows you say thank you for a gift.

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Human Developmental Maturity - Elder Stage

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Human Developmental Maturity - Elder Stage

ELDER (when the needs and tasks of the Parent have been fulfilled or the youngest child reaches adult maturity):
An elder is a father or mother to his/her community. They are able to treat children who are not their own with the same unselfish care they learned to give to their own children.

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Human Maturity Stages - Parent Maturity

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Human Maturity Stages - Parent Maturity

PARENT (from birth of first child to when the youngest child becomes an adult)
The Goal of the Parent stage is to learn to give sacrificially with joy, without expecting to receive in return.
Anyone who has ever been a parent knows that this new stage requires all we learned in the earlier stages—infant, child, adult—and more. Welcome to the parent stage! Only a person who has mastered the first three stages will have the capacity to give sacrificially to an infant.

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