“Are you choosing God’s way or your way?”  by Lindsay Oldright

This is a frequent question in our family when we can feel disobedience on the horizon with our kids. But let’s be honest, it isn’t just a question for my kids, it‘s a question for my own heart. Often as I ask that question, I’m convicted about my own choices over the last few days. I often choose the easy path, the comfortable path, the path that sees my opinion as more righteous than others and proceeds to judge others as unrighteous.  

The Bible contains the very words of God. He wrote and preserved it for us so we could know Him and how to live in a way that reflects and glorifies Him. Biblical interpretation is not a mysterious or impossible task limited to the elite or studious with lots of time. It is the delight and joy of every Christian woman to grow in understanding her marvelous God and His ways. We should approach scripture with the normal methods and rules that we would use to understand any written form of communication. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that the Bible is the word of God, so we should be diligent to handle it rightly by thoughtful reading, careful interpretation, and willing application of its words to our lives.

As people reconciled to God by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we believe that we are called to respond to conflict in a way that is remarkably different from the way the world deals with conflict

We also believe that conflict provides opportunities to glorify God, serve other people, and grow to be like Christ

Therefore, in response to God’s love and in reliance on his grace, we commit ourselves to respond to conflict according to the following principles:

11 Ways God Instructs Us to Live and Grow Together in a Sisterhood of Faith

1. Be united to Christ and the family of God: Mark 1:15, John 1:12-13, 1 Cor 11:1, 2 Cor 5:14-15, Eph 1:7-10, Eph 2:19-22, Eph 4:4-16, 1 John 1:7, 1 John 3:1-3

2. Continually pursue community with each other: Heb 10:24-25, 1 John, 1 Cor 15:58, Acts 4:32

3. Have a growing active love for each other: 1 John 3:11, 1 John 3:23, 1 John 4:7, 1 John 4:11, 1 John 4:12, 2 John 5, Rom 13:8, John 15:17, John 15:12, John 13:34, John 13:35 John 13:34, 1 Thess 4:9, 1 Peter 3:8, I Peter 4:8, 1 Thess 3:12, Romans 12:10

My journey into the world of chronic pain began in the summer of 2007. I remember it well. I was serving at our Kids Town Camp when I was gripped with a pain so severe, I ended up in the ER. After hours on a morphine drip and many diagnostic tests, I was sent home with the diagnosis of idiopathic hydronephrosis or swelling and spasms of the kidney without known cause.

I had this severe spastic, throbbing, nauseating pain off and on for 12 years. In the beginning, I had some months free of this pain but ended up in the ER frequently with flare-ups. Gradually my episodes begin to increase, to whereby the summer of 2017, I was gripped with almost constant spasms and level 10 pain. I was home flat in bed for days begging for pain meds and relief. I felt alone, exhausted, and desperate.