Faith

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The power of conviction

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The power of conviction

There’s a big difference between an opinion and a conviction.

And the difference is this. A conviction is an opinion acted on, regardless of the cost.

Plenty of people have opinions. Opinions are cheap. They don’t cost you anything. But it’s another story with convictions. Having a conviction may cost you everything. Maybe that’s why it sometimes seems very few people actually have many. Some people appear to have none at all!

Martin Luther nailed his convictions to the church door five hundred years ago. It cost him dearly. He suffered untold attack and persecution and was fortunate to have escaped with his life. But Luther and his convictions changed the course of history.

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Behind a frowning providence

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Behind a frowning providence

Behind a frowning providence there hides a smiling face. That’s a line from one of my favourite hymns, God moves in a mysterious way. 

Although he wrote it in 1773, it pretty well expresses what happened to us a few days ago. 

We had made the long trip to Ottawa to move our two youngest kids to university. We sandwiched this between moving house and leaving for the UK, so we were under a lot of pressure to begin with. There followed three of the most stressful, action-packed days I’ve had in many a year. We had so much to do that it utterly overwhelmed the time and energy available to do it. And inevitably, some things went wrong. 

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The great morning of God

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The great morning of God

Last week I talked about moving and the challenge of change. You have to pack everything up, live in a state of upheaval for weeks, if not months, and then hope you can actually make it from one place to another with your stuff and your sanity intact. With the sacrificial help of a great bunch of friends, we did.

If you’re smart, you give away a lot of stuff, and take note of how we accumulate way too many possessions, especially for those of us who profess to follow a man who owned none.

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The challenge of change

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The challenge of change

Change comes to all of us, whether we like it or not. Personally, I’ve never liked change a whole lot. I get settled in a routine and it’s hard to get me out of it.

God thinks differently, of course, than we do, on this subject as on everything else. He continually uses the pressure of circumstances to force change on us.

Next weekend, we move out of the house we have lived in for nineteen years and the community we have lived in for thirty-four years, in fact for our entire married life. We move out of a relatively secure job I have held all that time and into a who -knows-what-will-happen self-employment role.

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The price of miracles

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The price of miracles

We long for miracles. But there is a price to be paid. Let me try to explain.

We sold our house last week, but only after a battle.

This has been a consistent theme for us. On our first home, the private financing was deliberately pulled by a disgruntled church member after we had signed the papers to buy it. We were saved by a miracle.  We had to place an unconditional offer in order to secure our second house, and had only weeks to sell our first home (or face bankruptcy - again). We had another miracle.