Ministering to Spiritually Divorced Moms — Deb Douglas
It’s Sunday morning.
The argument was left hanging in the air as she rushed out of the house, feeling spiritually divorced from the man she loves. Why couldn’t he be like all those men sitting in the couples classes? Why couldn’t he be the one helping get the kids from the car to their Sunday school classes? Why does this good man have to be so against Jesus? She goes to her car crying and ponders what she must be doing wrong to be living this spiritually divorced life. Guilt, shame, and an overwhelming sense of dread isolate her.
5 Stubborn Leadership Myths You Should Abandon Immediately — Carey Nieuwhof
How do you know you haven’t fallen for a leadership myth that simply isn’t true?
Answer: sometimes you don’t.
Too many leaders hold a few damaging core beliefs that simply aren’t true.
Myths are everywhere in our culture.
It’s not that hard to roll our eyes at people who fall for urban legends.
That’s one of the reasons I really appreciate Snopes.com, a site dedicated to debunking urban legends.
Remember the stubborn myth a few years back about hotel operators using hotel key cards to download all your personal information? Because I stay in hotels regularly, so many people warned me about my hotel key. Thanks Snopes…..
Stop Multitasking You’ll Get More Work Done — Deborah Mitchell
There never seem to be enough hours in the day to get our work done. That’s why many of us turn to multi-tasking, which represents our best, noble attempt to accomplish multiple tasks. But it turns out that multitasking may actually limit productivity and ultimately affect your level, and your health. According to athlete and international and TEDx speaker Katie Brauer, “Higher productivity happens when you limit multitasking and stay focused on completing a task at hand. Studies show that multitasking makes you 40 percent less productive and increases stress levels.”
Christian Community Doesn’t Require Our Blind Trust — Maureen Garcia
Ask parents how they determine whom to trust with their children, and they’ll probably struggle to put it into words. Some go by a gut feeling. Some instinctively assume others—especially other Christians—are trustworthy until they somehow demonstrate that they are not.
But many of us have learned firsthand how our intuitions can be way off. In my life, people I didn’t think twice about proved to be morally questionable, even dangerous. According to Henry Cloud and John Townsend, the popular Christian therapists and authors of Safe People, our inability to judge character leads us to welcome “destructive people” in our lives.
Ministry Makes You More Holy or More Hypocritical — Eric Geiger
Ministry will make you more holy or more of a hypocrite. Ministering to others will drive you to the Word, to your knees in prayer, and to a holy dependence on God OR ministering to others will confront you with the opportunity to pretend to be someone you are not. Ministry will develop you or it will destroy you.
Tim Keller poignantly writes of these two possibilities, and these only two possibilities, in his recent book Preaching:
Often your heart will not be in a condition to say such a thing [that God is so wonderful] with full commitment and integrity. You then have two choices. Either you have to watch your heart more closely, warming up continually so you can preach to people what you are practicing; or you have to learn to put on a ministerial air and become something on the outside that you are not on the inside… I continually observe that preaching amplifies people’s spiritual character. It makes them far better or far worse Christians than they would have been otherwise. (From Preaching, page 197)
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