“…sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all – just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid, then it’s not real change.” from Nathan Hill’s novel The Nix
Tag Archives: fear
Idols Created By Fear
The Nightmare Driving the American Dream
What Kind of Father Do You Imagine Him To Be?
“Do you think he’s a demanding, impatient, angry Father just waiting for an opportunity to punish you? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you need the comfort that only the gospel can bring…” -Elyse Fitzpatrick, Comforts from the Cross
Cultural Observation: The Worry Epidemic
Worry Doesn’t Do Much
“Even when he became gravely ill while traveling, the letters he wrote from the road revealed a teasing, tender sweetness. In 1546, on the way home from a conference with the dukes in Eisleben,
Luther wrote: To the saintly, worrying Lady Katherine Luther, doctor at Zulsdorf and Wittenberg, my gracious dear wife: We thank you heartily for being so worried that you can’t sleep, for since you started worrying about us, a fire broke out near my door and yesterday, no doubt due to your worry, a big stone, save for the dear angels, would have fallen and crushed us like a mouse in a trap. If you don’t stop worrying, I’m afraid the earth will swallow us.” [Bainton, Women of the Reformation]
Michelle DeRusha, 50 Women Every Christian Should Know
We’ve Had the Best, All That’s Left is the Rest?
Ipsos Mori research in more than twenty countries found that “most young adults in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia fear that their nations’ best days are behind them. . . . Ina stark warning, the head of the world’s foremost economic research institute, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), described such pessimism among western youth as ‘politically explosive.’ ” -David Murray, The Happy Christian
Divine Humility
Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them. I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up ‘our own’ when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of Scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it ‘unmindful of His glory’s diminution’.” -C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Why We Fear the Holy
“We fear the holy because we are not holy.” -R.C. Sproul
A Pilgrim's Theology 