Tag: God

Easter surprise

Article for Easter 2020

We know well in advance that Easter is on the way by all the Easter eggs and hot cross buns that the shops start selling around Valentine’s Day. The swiftness with which the year marches towards the holiday may take us by surprise but the long weekend certainly doesn’t.

However, nearly two thousand years ago that first Easter morning came as a complete surprise to those who had watched Jesus arrested, tried and crucified.

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Disrupting redesigns

I have been watching interior design shows on Netflix recently. I’m inspired by the creativity and cleverness of those who take nice but ordinary rooms and turn them into works of art.

What I have noticed though is that, without fail, those rooms always look worse before they look better. The day before the big reveal, you couldn’t possibly imagine how it is all going to come together.

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Long-term effects

I read today that doctors suspect a link between Covid-19 and Parkinson’s disease. Apparently the inflammation caused by Covid could have long-term effects on the body and lead to more serious repercussions later in life.

The longer the pandemic progresses, I imagine that may prove to be only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ripple-effects of the scourge. Who knows what else one might be susceptible to after surviving Covid-19?

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Christianity is not for cowards

People might think that being a Christian is easy, a crutch that gets you through your traumas, a Father Christmas in the sky to pray to, a list of dos and don’ts that you do your best to follow but get forgiveness for when you fail.

However, as a Christian of several decades, I can tell you Christianity is not for cowards; being a Christian requires you to do some very, very hard stuff. Some of the things I find hardest are: forgiving over and over again, submitting to authority, waiting with patience and coping with suffering.Continue reading

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God’s character – light

When we try to imagine God, so often we think of some sort of superhuman. That, if God exists, He must be like us but stronger, faster and invincible. Maybe like some sort of Father Christmas or Father Time, old, bearded and benevolent. Or like Zeus, angry and vengeful like a warrior.

However, the Bible tells us that God is not human. We are made in His image – we are like Him in some aspects – and He revealed Himself to us as the man Jesus, but God the Father is not a man, He is a spirit (John 4:24). God does call Himself in the Bible a Father and there is mention of His hands and eyes and hears. But the Bible also uses animal imagery to try to describe God, it talks about God’s wings and Jesus is compared to both a lion and a lamb. And God also uses inanimate things to convey information about His attributes, like God being a pillar of fire and the cloud that the Israelites saw in the wilderness.

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Things I have learnt about God – mercy.

Mercy is not really a word used in modern language – except maybe in the US South as an exclamation, “Have mercy!” It is not a concept we bandy about in conversation, although I imagine most people generally know that it is similar to the legal idea of clemency – getting off or getting a lighter sentence when you deserve punishment.

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