'Joy: To the World!' Part Four - Final Excerpt

-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Points About Cohabitation You May Not Have Considered

-
COMMENTARY BY Caitlin Thomas Caitlin Thomas is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. More young adults are opting to cohabit rather than marry or to delay marriage for financial reasons, such as debt, according to a recent  study published in Demography. However, National Marriage Week  presents a good opportunity to review how rigorous, long-term studies  have measured the substantial impact of marriage on financial stability, as well as relationship longevity and health outcomes. Here are five additional facts you may not know about cohabitation: 1. Cohabiting couples are more prone to break up (and break up for good) than married couples.   In the May 2003 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family Study, Georgina Binstock and Arland Thornton  found that, in the first year of living together, couples who cohabited were eight times more likely to end their relationships than those who were married.  In the second and thir...
Read more

Journey To Christmas

-
Image
Perhaps it was the cumulative years of writing Advent sermons, gradually building up such a vivid sense of anticipation, that a creative outlet of joyous expression was bound to happen despite the tremendous adversity that lay ahead in my journey... Apparently, you can count on the biased CBC to mock Christmas. But the comic rant decrying those auto-generated carol playlists does have a point. Malls + holiday songs do not equal cheer. Rather, for me, they stir a rising cynicism like the 4 progressive stages of hypertension! The antidote is a necessary exercise of deeper reflection in response to the frenetic consumerism and the tinney holiday trappings of secularist attempts to replace Christ, the very reason for my joy in celebrating this season.  I do love Christmas. This is the season for imagining what is possible, for dreaming new dreams, for hoping beyond hope. But someone observed that it is also the season when hope can be hardest to find, dreams hardest to believe. ...
Read more

Embracing the Mystery

-
Image
My name is Joy. People often say that I live up to it, although life has sobered me some and, unfortunately, I probably laugh less and carry more burdens than I used to. I’m the wife of a pastor, and the daughter of missionaries. My husband and I met in Bible College, married, went to Regent College to do masters studies, and then right into full time ministry. We took over a church plant and ministered there for almost nine years. During that time we were very busy raising our five children, two of whom have cleft lip and palate as well as Autism. They’re all precious gifts that circle us with love. Over three long years ago my husband, Ken, started feeling very tired and experienced aching muscles and cramps. He carried on pastoring but would take days to recover after each Sunday. As doctors tried to determine what was wrong with him, we went through one of the worst phases of a long-term illness — not having validation. It wasn’t until February of 2005 that we received the diag...
Read more