Searching for Meaning and Purpose...

What would it look like if we lived our lives based on faith? I mean this seriously, because we so often talk about faith but seem to care about it and possess so little! Hebrews (11:1) says " Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. " Now, with that in mind, are you living in faith? Now, note here, I am NOT , NOT , NOT , pushing a health and wealth, name it and claim it, kind of thing here. Yes, I may hope for a custom made Dodge Viper to appear on my doorstep, but that's not what my hope is built on or for! That is just the selfish nature rearing its head and saying, "GIMME!!!!" Now, let's look at this verse in context and determine what it really means... Following the verse is a list of people who had "faith." Their faith wasn't necessarily getting what they wanted (or at all!) I mean, just look at the examples he gives and then the fact that he goes on...

I've been thinking about the beauty of creation. Whether it's the mountains like out in Glenwood Springs this past weekend or the rolling plains that are slowly becoming green here in KS, God made a really awesome world for us. That's the key though: for us. We may see the beauty, but each grain of sand and blade of grass was made for our pleasure. The flip side is this: we were made as the apple of God's eye. In Genesis, we see God saying that His creation is good until He made mankind, at which point He said it was "very good." If everything until that point it was simply "good" what does that say about us? Many people are stuck in a twisted game trying to measure up to someone else's standards. The truth is that we were made beautiful and looking like God. If we were made to be "very good" why do we let others tell us we're not good enough? The truth is you were made very good and completely perfected like God. What are...

This seems like a pretty simple statement, but it is something that is being combated so heavily today! People like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins seem more aggressive than many through the years and they are much more vitriolic than their predecessors. But why? Looking at the road today, no one would ever be stupid enough to look at a big truck and exclaim, "Wow. It's so amazing that this big truck randomly came together out of the primordial ooze to form this fully working organism..." However, people claim that humanity (the human body is more complex than anything we can even grasp: a machine that replicates even one of our bodily functions is virtually impossible for us to render because of its complexity. The only portion that has been duplicated are simple machines like the Jarvik heart [a pump]) came about randomly. Richard Dawkins talks about the fact that blind chance leads to all possibilities eventually; one of his examples is that given a set ...