You’ll Have to Pay Extra if You Want to Check Your Baggage

If you’ve ever traveled on an airline, you’re quite aware that packing light is the smartest choice. Airlines are demanding beefy fees for heavy baggage. If your bag weighs over 50 pounds, you could find yourself paying anywhere from $90-$300 per piece according to the rules of Delta and Continental Airlines.

Bottom line? If you want to bring your baggage along, you’re going to have to pay.

The same is true with Christians. If you’re determined to carry around emotional and spiritual baggage, you’ll be paying the price. That’s why the Word tells us in Hebrews 12:1 to “throw off everything that hinders us, and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with perseverance, the race marked out for us.”

If a plane is carrying too much baggage, it can crash. The same is true with us. We can’t run with perseverance when we try to strap a heavy load to our backs. Anger, bitterness, jealousy, hurt, rejection…You can label all of these “heavy baggage.” Hanging onto them will weigh us down, at best, and completely cripple us emotionally and spiritually, at worst. Read more

What’s in Your Spiritual Junk Drawer?

If you are like the average American, one of the drawers in your kitchen is most likely the designated “junk drawer.” This is the drawer that you conveniently use to hide…err, I mean store miscellaneous items that you aren’t really sure what to do with. My junk drawer contains recent bill receipts, a burned out light bulb from the bathroom vanity (so I can take it with me when I purchase another one instead of just guessing which one to buy), an extension cord, scotch tape, scissors…no wait, the scissors are always missing, random screws that have fallen out of things, buttons, coupons I think I might use, address labels that I’ve torn off of envelopes….well, you get the point. Read more

Finding The Power to Overcome

Writing about The Backwardness of New Year’s Resolutions really got me thinking. In that post we went over the fact that most resolutions, 95% in fact, are abandoned within months of making them, and 80% are said to be discarded by mid January. That’s quite a bag of abandoned goals, don’t you think?

Since most New Year’s resolutions consist of positive changes that we already know we should make, let’s take a closer look at the power we will need to actually achieve and overcome in this life. Read more

The Backwardness of New Year’s Resolutions

As Christians, we realize (or should realize) that salvation is free. It’s not something we can earn and there is nothing we can ever do to deserve it. That’s the beauty of it. We were once lost and helpless…we needed hope and direction and God sent His Son to set us free from the sinful state of the world we were born into. We made the decision, asked Jesus into our heart, and then the trouble began… Read more

No Reason to Complain…You Already Won the Lottery

If you truly grasp the fact that your sins are forgiven….not in a fleeting way, but actually and consciously make yourself aware of this truth, what can there possibly be to complain about?

You have to admit it, we all do…We are tremendously spoiled. We often sit around contemplating what we would do if we won the lottery, but have you ever considered that you already have? Read more

Finding the Place of Contentment

Webster’s Dictionary defines contentment as: a feeling of calm satisfaction.

As we approach these last days before Christmas, I suppose I could write to you about a million other topics. We could talk about last minute gifts, family traditions, or the real meaning of the season. Instead, I feel that a root issue among many Christians today is contentment.

Peace and contentment go hand in hand, since you really can’t have one without the other. When we find ourselves discontented or lacking peace, we often look to the wrong things for relief. Our culture teaches us that our internal problems and feelings are a direct result of outside circumstances. If we feel discontented, we often think that a nice holiday, new goals, more money, or a trip to the mall for some retail therapy will ease our pain. Maybe we feel discontented because of a strained relationship and we think that if we could just make it better, everything would be okay. Read more

Stay on Your Own Path! No One Can Be You But YOU!

Don’t you just love kittens? They all seem to have a wild case of attention deficit disorder. A kitten can seem to be completely engrossed in what they are doing one second, but all you have to do is dangle a shiny object or piece of string within their peripheral vision and bam…they will quickly leave what they had been so interested in to run after the distraction.

Have you ever known a person like that? Maybe you are like that.

Have you ever found yourself completely satisfied with your work, your family, your financial situation, and life in general…but then all of a sudden an old friend, a colleague you’d lost touch with, an ex-spouse, or distant relative pops on the scene talking about the doctorate degree they’ve just earned, and suddenly it’s as if the wind has been let out of your sails? Read more

Are You Passing Life’s Tests?

If you haven’t read the book, A Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, go ahead and put it on your Christmas list. This powerful book takes you through a 40 day spiritual journey that will help you to answer life’s most important question, “What on earth am I here for?” Once you’ve read the book in its entirety, it is still a good one to keep by the bedside for reference purposes. Opening mine to a random page the other day, took me to a paragraph that has stuck with me all week. It was about tests…

Why Are We Tested? Read more

Ready to Take the Complaint Free Challenge?

The Word of God includes a promise that I have always found fascinating. It’s found in James 3:2 — We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check.

Wait a minute…What does that say? If anyone is never at fault in what he says??… So, this Scripture  tells us that if we are able to control our words or tame our unruly tongue, we can keep our whole body in check. Wow…The Amplified Bible says it this way:

For we all often stumble and fall and offend in many things. And if anyone does not offend in speech [never says the wrong things], he is a fully developed character and a perfect man, able to control his whole body and to curb his entire nature.

Seems pretty simple at first glance, doesn’t it? From this verse we could conclude, and rightly so, that if our words are always filled with wisdom, compassion toward others, truthfulness, understanding and love, we could overcome every obstacle in our flesh (such as bad habits, overeating, anger, addictions, lust, etc.). Sounds like a plan. Read more

Attitudes Are Contagious…Is Yours Worth Catching?

I heard this quote a while ago and it really made me stop and think….First of all, I wondered about the validity of the statement. Are attitudes truly contagious? According to an in-depth research study conducted by the University of Chicago and Harvard, the answer is “yes.” In fact, attitudes are almost viral; infectious.

Looking at it from a Christian perspective, I realized that underlying attitudes are sometimes swept under the rug. Let’s take a deeper look at the reasoning behind this.

Outward Change

Many times, as Christians, we focus on change that is evident on the outside. This is pretty normal, since outward flaws are the ones that tend to affect the people in our lives that mean the most to us. Outward change might consist of taking a stand against sexual sin, addictions, lying, gossip, or even our choice of friends. Choosing good habits and abandoning clearly sinful practices are definitely steps in the right direction. But, there is another step in our walk that we often overlook…change from the inside. Read more

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