If the Lord wills

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 
“If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

Larry Crabbs on Shattered dreams

I want to share a quote from page 22 of Crabbs’s book

“Depending on an unresponsive God in the middle of crumbling dreams can be tough on faith. Relating personally with a God who is less responsive than friends with far fewer resources is difficult.

Exactly what is God doing with all his power? At some point in your Christian life you’ll be forced to admit that Jesus didn’t make it on your list of responsive, valued friends. Live long enough, and dreams important to you will shatter. Some will remain shattered. God will not glue together the pieces of ever Humpty Dumpty who takes a great fall in your life.

The divorce will go through, the cancer will claim a loved one’s life, the Alzheimer’s will not be arrested (let alone reversed) by the latest drug. The broken friendship will not be restored despite your best efforts to reconcile. Your marriage will not be satisfying no matter how many counselors your consult or seminars you attend. Your singleness will be an intolerable burden. The budding ministry will never materialize. The lost income will not be replaced by money pouring out of heaven’s windows.

You’ll feel low for a long time; the dark tunnel will lengthen with no light visible at its end. Your sense of adventure will yield to dutiful drudgery. You will be miserable. Your dream of feeling alive, captivated by beauty and passionately free, will die.

And God won’t do a thing…”



But wait, that is not the end of the story.

Life = Risk

If you have never failed, You've never lived.

Shattered Dreams - Lesson six

Lesson 6 ~ The past is irreparable; the future is always available.  In every case, when good dreams shatter, better ones are there to newly value and pursue.  These better dreams are indestructible; they will not be taken away from us either by God (because He is good) or by the forces of hell (because evil has no power to thwart God’s highest purposes).   The sixth lesson – no matter what happens in life, a wonderful dream is available, always, that if pursued will generate an unfamiliar, radically new internal experience.  That experience, strange at first, will eventually be recognized as joy.

Shattered Dreams - Lesson five

Lesson 5 ~ Most people never discover true life.  Unbelievers don’t possess it.  Believer’s, all of them, do possess it, but not many experience it.  The fifth lesson – Not many Christians drink deeply from the well of living water.  As a result, our worship, our community and our witness are weak.

Shattered Dreams - Lesson four

Lesson 4 ~ A child always given candy never learns to like vegetables.  A student never required to read Shakespeare or to listen to Beethover never develops a taste for more than sensational fiction and noisy music.  Similarly, when lesser dreams reliably come true, we have a hard time appreciating greater dreams.  We neither envision them nor pursue them.  The fourth lesson – Only an experience of deep pain develops our capacity for recognizing and enjoying true life.

Shattered Dreams - Lesson three

Lesson 3 ~ Some cherished dreams will crumble in your life.  That’s inevitable.  It happens to all of us before we’re through living down here.  No one makes it unscathed to the end.  Whether we believe that God cause the trial (as Naomi did) or that God merely allowed the trial, one thing is clear:  He could have prevented the trial.  he could have given us a good time, at least a better time than we had.  The fact creates within us a tension with God.   The third lesson – Some dreams important to us will shatter, and the realization that God could have fulfilled that dream pushes us into a terrible battle with him.

Shattered Dreams - Lesson two

Lesson 2 ~ Shattered dreams produce excruciating pain, sometimes to extreme that we fear we cannot survive.  And that is true.  The person we are before the pain cannot survive.  We emerge from the experience of shattered dreams as changed people, but not always for the better.  The pain is not evidence of weak faith.  It is evidence that we are normal.  It’s part of a necessary process.  The pain is necessary if we’re to discover within us an appetite for better dreams that before we neither noticed nor appreciated.   The second lesson – Something wonderful survives everything terrible, and it surfaces most clearly when we hurt.

Shattered Dreams - Lesson one

Lesson 1 ~ Our fondest dreams for this life, the ones we naturally believe are essential to our happiness, must be fully abandoned if we are to know God well.  But we cannot abandon them without help.  The help we need, most often, is suffering, the pain of seeing at least a few of our fondest dreams shattered.    The first lesson – Shattered dreams are necessary for spiritual growth.

Shattered Dreams by Larry Crabb - Part two

Shattered dreams are never random. They are always a piece in a larger puzzle, a chapter in a larger story. The Holy Spirit uses the pain of shattered dreams to help us discover our desire for God, to help us begin dreaming the highest dream. They are ordained opportunities for the Spirit to awaken, then to satisfy our highest dream.


God is always working to make His children aware of a dream that remains alive beneath the rubble of every shattered dream, a new dream that when realized will release a new song, sung with tears, till God wipes them away and we sing with nothing but joy in our hearts."

Shattered Dreams by Larry Crabb - Part one

One way he works is to allow our lower dreams to shatter.  He lets us hurt and doesn’t make it better.  We suffer and He stands by and does nothing to help, at least nothing that we’re aware we want Him to do.  In fact, what he’s doing while we suffer is leading us into the depths of our being, into the center of our soul where we feel our strongest passions. It’s there that we discover our desire for God.  We begin to feel a desire to know Him that not only survives all our pain, but actually thrives in it until that desire becomes more intense than our desire for all the good things we still want.  Through the pain of shattered lower dreams, we wake up to the realization that we want and encounter with God more than we want the blessings of life.  And that begins a revolution in our lives.”

Up for a challenge... Anyone?

Today I've challenged myself to finish the entire bible in 30days.
I've divided the bible books in 5 category.
1- Old testament Reading ( approx 30 chapters)
2- Psalm Reading (5 chapters)
3- Proverbs Reading (1 chapter)
4- Gospels Reading (3 chapters)
5- New Testament Reading (6 Chapters)

Approx 45 Chapters a day.  God will help me to finish it all up.

PRAYER OF REPENTANCE

"Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask Your forgiveness and to seek Your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, "Woe to those who call evil good," but that’s exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values. We confess that:
We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it pluralism.
We have worshipped other gods and called it multi-culturalism.
We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it a choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem.
We have abused power and called it political savvy.
We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the airwaves with profanity and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us, O God, and know our hearts today; try us and see if there be some wicked way in us; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas, and who have been ordained by You, to govern this great state. Grant them Your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of Your
will... Amen




*Joe Wright is the pastor of Central Christian Church in Wichita, KS. On January 23, 1996, He was asked to be the guest chaplain for the Kansas State House in Topeka. He prayed a prayer of repentance that was written by Bob Russell, pastor of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. According to an article in the Kansas City Star from January 24, 1996, his prayer stirred controversy, and one member of the legislative body walked out. Others criticized the prayer. 
The controversy didn't end there. Later that year in the Colorado House, Republican representative Mark Paschall angered lawmakers by using Joe Wright's prayer as the invocation. Some members there also walked out in protest.
Paul Harvey got a hold of the prayer and read it on his program. He got more requests for copies of it than any other thing he had ever done.

Day-8 of the 40 days Journey

Day-7 of the 40 days Journey

Day-6 of the 40 days Journey

6th Day, It's amazing how time flies.... it's been six days(technically 7 day coz i don't count sundays)
I've had a unique journey so far. Trusting God in the day to day.

Though i woke up at my regular time, I reached to  church a bit late 7 AM something....
Pastor Younus led the devotion. He was sharing about the life of  Sidrak Mishak and Abednago
They made a bold statement which any one wont dare to say in their right mind. God will save us from this fire, even if he doesen't save us....... in other way, they were saying if it is the will of God for us to die we will die, if it is the will of God to save us he will save us. This is a kind of prayer that needs a gut to say it. Only Jesus said that. Father if it is your will Let his cup pass from me but now my will, Let your will be done.

When they pray that, and while being in the fire, God showed up to be with them. The fire didn't burn them be cause they were already set on fire for God. At a times God shows up when we are in fire....

We sang I surrender all at the  end.