Welcome to Your New Life
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The Lord spoke to me about several themes in 2022. In July of 2022 the Lord said to me, Welcome to your new life. I remember thinking, I wonder what that means. Then he said, It's a new season.
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HCI History, Part 2: "The First Two Years"
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Now that I was certain God was calling me to start a Healing Center, I pressed in to him seeking to understand. As I prayed, God began to show me what he had in mind. First, I knew that I should help Hayes Perdue (the young priest) teach Listening for Heaven’s Sake at our church, Church of the Apostles in Fairfax, Virginia. He had taken the class, along with other classes offered by Equipping Ministries International –Speaking the Truth in Love and Renewing the Mind—while he was in seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and I had taken the same ones in California. I bought the teaching curriculum for Listening. As a teacher, I was impressed with the teacher manual. All I had to do was add personal illustrations. Easy for a storyteller like me!
Read MoreHCI History, Part 1: "I'm Calling You to Start a Healing Center."
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It all began when I married Sam. I was a single mother of a three-year-old and was in the dissertation-writing phase of my Ph.D. program at Stanford. To marry me, Sam had to leave his beloved Virginia and move across the country. We married in Los Angeles County in Glendora, the town just north of where I had grown up. After the wedding, Sam moved into my tiny townhouse on the Stanford campus with Nina and me. (That story is told in Crossroads Before Me.)
Read MoreUrbana 2022, Part 2
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I awoke with the sun, feeling more rested than I had in months. Today was the day we would begin ministering to students. I called Christina, and we agreed to meet in the hotel lobby in an hour. I went down to the restaurant for breakfast. The hostess sat me at a small table. I ordered a platter of fruit, then noticed a woman about my age sitting at a small table about 12 feet away, facing me. Our eyes met.
I called out, “Are you also here for Urbana?”
Urbana 2022, Part 1
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One of my highlights of 2022 was volunteering as a prayer minister and team leader at Urbana a mission conference for InterVarsity (IV), an inter-denominational, evangelical campus ministry founded in 1941.
Read MoreO Come Let Us Adore Him
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It’s Christmastime again, and as the old song says, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.
But is it?
Read MoreHow Should We Then Live in This Apostolic Age? (Part Two)
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Last month we reflected on the sad news that Christendom is dying—that is, the culture, systems, and institutions that develop when Christianity is the dominant worldview. Now, we are moving into a new apostolic age, an age where the cultural vision of reality is opposed to Christianity. We want to live wisely in this new age. How shall we do this?
Read MoreChristendom Versus Apostolic Age (Part One)
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Recently David Takle urged me to watch a series of sermons that were based on the book “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age.” I watched the first sermon then switched to the book. It was eye opening. It explained the shifting season we are living in.
It begins with these words, “Every human society possesses . . . a moral and spiritual imaginative vision . . . that is largely taken for granted. It is a way of seeing things.” The entire society embraces this vision whether they know it or not. Once it is settled, it becomes over time, unconscious. When a new vision challenges the old, the original vision will be “reconstituted or overthrown and another overarching vision takes its place.” Our vision “is the basis of our action,” though “for the majority the ruling vision is never examined, because it is not known to exist”. To most people it seems self-evident”.
Read MoreFive Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Spend Time Interacting with Jesus
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In our final blog, in this series, I want to encourage you to spend more time interacting with God. Rather than talk about the importance of this practice, I am giving you a spiritual exercise that will help you do the very thing I am urging you to do. It is from a new book, Living Fearless by Jamie Winship.
Read MoreTen Things I Learned While Studying Racial Reconciliation by Dan Van Ness
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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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