Soul Sister Time

My friend asked me to listen to some audio teaching about healing. She wanted me to help her evaluate the biblical foundations of what is being taught. It’s always a good idea to have someone else consider the teachings you are receiving, especially if they seem a little on the radical side. The thing about miracles is that Jesus did say that our faith is vital to experiencing them—some of the greatest faith around was from Gentiles who came to Jesus for healing (Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28 and the Roman Centurion in Matthew 8:5-13). There are times when the person being healed is not mentioned to have faith (healing of paralyzed man in Luke 5:17-26), rather the healing results from the faith of the friends. Other times, faith is not attributed to anyone around or even the person being healed (as in the case of the man born blind in John 9 and the man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5:1-15). By the way, how ignorant of God can you be after he healed you from a lifetime dis

            Isn’t it just like God to show up in the place where you least expect Him?   I did expect to feel a connection to God when I went to preview a movie that will be coming out on October 7 called The Way .   I knew the basic plot of the movie—that it involved a grieving father and the well-known Christian pilgrimage across the country of Spain called The St. James Way (El Camino de Santiago) .   In fact, the pilgrimage has been on my list of dream trips             What I least expected was to be so amazed by the real life faith expressed by the movie’s star Martin Sheen and to be impressed with the family connection and closeness experienced by Martin and his son Emilio Estevez (of Breakfast Club fame) the writer and director who also appears in the movie.    This preview was arranged in Dallas where the Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez met with audiences after viewing the movie to discuss the story behind the movie.   At the beginning of this conversation I was surprised tha

            Holiness is an ambiguous concept we encounter on our spiritual journey.   Every time I stop to consider what it means to be holy, I wonder how God could even suggest holiness could exist in humans.   I think it reveals His great love for us.   He loves us so much He sees that we are capable of more than we could ever even come close to conceiving.             Holiness fits right into the category of impossibility.   Yet it is what God is all about in our lives.   God says that there are people who are holy.   In Acts 3:21, He calls the prophets holy.   I understand how things could be holy or even a place can be holy.   But it is when God calls a person holy or even suggests that I should strive for holiness that the idea becomes inconceivable.               When I think about the holy prophets (mentioned in Acts 3:21) who told about Jesus, I know that they each had their failures along the way.   Not one lived a perfect life.   What made them holy was their will that was d

    It’s not that I haven’t faced my own degree of personal suffering. It isn’t that I am numb to the vast array of suffering that is taking place all over the world at this very moment in time. It is that I remain confident in the grandeur of God’s goodness even as the reality of the suffering in this world is too much for my heart to bear. I believe that no degree of suffering is ignored by the loving God who created a universe in which suffering was never intended to exist. If I could fully take all the suffering of this world, my heart and soul would never survive. The weight of suffering is too heavy for me. Yet, I know He knows every degree of suffering taking place even in this moment. God alone has the capacity to face the reality of the suffering of His entire creation. Beyond that, I know He is working to end the suffering of this world. So then, you may ask , Why ? My only answer is to tell you to look to God. See His response to suffering. He has taken not just th