personal relationship with God

SUMMING UP CHRISTMAS

(December 04, 2023) Wayne Swift calls it as it really is regarding Christmas…

1. Someone has to pay 
When something goes wrong, the repair costs!

Something went wrong with the church lift and we tried to reset it… but it didn’t work. Eventually we had to have a serviceman come to repair the lift and – surprise, surprise – we had to pay for his time.

  • To put it simply… something went wrong and someone had to pay.

One Friday I noticed a screw in the tyre of Ruth’s car and knew that it was only a matter of time before the tyre went flat, as in this icon. So I had a choice – pay now or pay later. To get the problem fixed I needed to find someone with a solution. Something went wrong and someone had to pay.

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‘AND THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS’… BUT IS IT?

(July 19, 2022) Robert McQuillan challenges…

Psychologist Dr Andre Tessier, counselling a friend who is wondering about himself, who he really is, his future, answers honestly… ‘I’m only a doctor. I can’t tell something I don’t know… but let me show you something. See those books over there?’

Tapping several books in the packed bookshelves, he names Carl Jung and other well-known thinkers commenting, ‘Hundreds of books! Sum total of man’s knowledge of his fellowman. Yet in a moment like this, they fail. That’s why when I’m faced with such a moment, I always turn to this book, older than all the others by thousands of years.’  

Taking a black jacketed book, he searches through it. ‘Ah, here we are,’ he smiles, ‘Proverbs, twenty-third chapter, seventh verse,  “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”’

Leaving it with the troubled man to consider the reality of Solomon’s words, Dr Tessier encourages him tobelieve deeply in his heart, his soul, emphasising… ‘And that’s all that matters.’

Believing in one’s very soul
‘Heart’ is an interesting word found throughout that ‘ancient book’, speaking of various hearts troubled by  grief, deceit, discouragement, hatred, hardening (that’s the short list!).

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THE GENERAL’S UNANSWERABLE QUESTION
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(April 01, 2021) Robert McQuillan recalls an Easter reflection…

As many know, Maureen and I often relax by watching old movies and TV series. Anyone remember that avant-garde classic cult British series from the 60s The Prisoner?

The late Patrick McGoohan, its creator, played an unnamed secret service agent who for no apparent reason resigns only to be taken captive to a mysterious coastal locale in Wales known as The Village. Here he is technologically interrogated as to his real motive for resigning – with what was then unheard-of equipment.

Consequently the question his inquisitors repeatedly ask is – Why? meaning ‘for what purpose; with what intention, reason, or motive.’

Unanswerable question
Number 6 – as he’s referred to – turns the tables in one episode when his interrogators are using The General, an invincible machine regarding any question asked. He requests to type in a one-word question claiming it cannot be answered.

‘Impossible,’ he’s countered, told that there’s no question The General can’t understand, answer.

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But on his one word being inserted the machine abruptly goes haywire, smoke and sparks flying everywhere.

To the inquisitors’ amazement, it totally disintegrates exploding with a great erupting bang.

What was the question that Number 6 then states as being ‘Insoluble to man and machine’? The one unanswerable word – ‘Why?’

Different ‘General’
Some 40 years ago I knew a certain businessman – whose name I can’t disclose – but call the General. Taking me to lunch at a classy restaurant, he insisted on lavishly treating me.

But this was more than a business luncheon… it was his way of thanking me for having gladly stood alongside him for several hours in a private hospital while surgeons preformed a dangerous operation on his wife.

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OVERWHELMED BY GOD’S STRONG LOVE

(March 11, 2021) Amber Varela, studying at Lighthouse Christian Academy, Los Angeles, brings shares a ReachOut testimony...

On 24-hour shifts, rifle-ready Lee Yih would peer across the border into East Germany, guarding against Soviet troops that never came. On his days off, the U.S. Army soldier fought with his wife and got stoned.

‘I was really aliened, Lee says. ‘I was just a loser, just not functioning in life.’

Before he lost his way in life, Lee Yih says he was born with great ambitions to be rich – a stark contrast to growing up as the offspring of a date rape in a single parent home. Being Asian, he felt like an outcast among all-white classmates in Mount Joy, Iowa.

Feeling lonely, unloved
‘I hated to be Chinese. I told my mom I wanted to be white. In the town where I grew, there were no other Chinese people and I wanted so much to fit in. Basically, I had no identity.’ His mother bristled at his rebellious rejection of Asian culture, so she shipped him off to Taiwan to learn Chinese when he was 15 years old.

‘I got worse problems because where once I felt so Chinese in Iowa and so foreign and not fitting in, now I was really not fitting in because I’m in China and so American!’ he recounts.

Then a friend invited him to a Christian camp. ‘I got snookered into going to a Baptist youth camp,’ he remembers. (more…)