Author: trosionalo
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You’ve Read Your Bible, Prayed Every Day, and Still Feel Empty
When the routine keeps going and the person inside it goes quiet. Same chair. Six-fifteen in the morning, coffee still too hot to drink, Bible open to wherever the ribbon…
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Does God Still Answer Prayer, or Am I Talking to the Ceiling?
Some prayers wear out the person praying them long before they wear out the words. There is a sound that an empty room makes after someone has been praying in…
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Five People Who Met Jesus Once and Were Never the Same
Same rabbi. Same road. Five completely different answers. Four times in the Gospels, someone meets Jesus once and their life bends in a direction it was never going. One time,…
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The Soldier Who Asked Jesus for Help — Not for Himself
A Roman officer crossed every line that existed to ask a Jewish healer to save his property. The word in Greek is doulos, and in Matthew’s account it gets translated…
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Jesus Disappeared for 18 Years. What Happened?
One verse covers eighteen years of the most important life ever lived. Last fall I sat down with a legal pad and tried to build a timeline of Jesus’s life.…
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Why Does God Let Good People Suffer?
Some questions outlast every answer we throw at them. Last Tuesday at 2:14 in the morning, someone typed six words into a search bar: why does God let people suffer.…
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When You’re the One Everyone Leans On (and Nobody Asks How You Are)
Some people hold so much for so long that no one remembers they have hands of their own. Last Sunday, during the prayer before the offering, I watched a woman…
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The Fear No One in Church Talks About: Becoming a Burden
What we mean when we say we don’t want to be a bother. Last fall I visited a woman from our church in the hospital, three days after her hip…
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7 Things God Says He Hates — None Are What You’d Expect
The list God made is shorter than you think, and stranger. Last winter I picked up a secondhand commentary on Proverbs that someone had marked up with a yellow highlighter.…
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You Retired. Now Who Are You?
The calendar didn’t care that you weren’t ready. Last Tuesday I pulled into the church parking lot twenty minutes early and sat there with the engine off, watching a man…