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Showing posts from October, 2014

Dealing with Doubt

    Do you ever feel like a fraud? I do. I sometimes wonder what on earth I am doing as someone who has made a career choice for ministry when I find myself wrestling with so many doubts. I question my calling, my personal integrity, my work, and even whether or not I truly believe all the tenets of the faith I'm supposed to be proclaiming. If you feel like this, you are not alone! Everyone, at some point in their life, will experience seasons of doubt. They can be scary but they can also be very fruitful when we approach them not as a sign that we are hopeless but rather as an opportunity for growth and deepening of our faith.            1. Identifying doubts Not all doubts are the same. In thinking about this, the tri-perspectival grid that one of my teachers, John Frame, always worked with came to mind. There are normative, existential and situational types of doubts.   Normative doubts. They are doubts about theological truth claims: claims of the Bible, such a

Dying with Dignity

A young woman of 29, Brittany Maynard, recently announced that she was going to end her own life after finding out she had terminal brain cancer ( see here ). Her reasoning? She wants to decide when it is time for her to go and avoid potentially excruciating pain. Her story is very moving and is unarguably tragic. Christians who have tried to speak graciously into this situation have come under fire for being so judgmental of her decision ( see here for a kind response). So why are Christians so hung up on euthanasia? Are they just mean and critical? Please take the time to understand why. It is because the assumptions behind physician assisted suicide contradict a biblical worldview. Assumption #1: “I am completely in charge of my life” I am the sole person who can decide whether my life is worth living. When my life quality has become too difficult to bear, I can decide to end my life. Since I am dying anyway, why should I prolong the suffering? The Christian's Pro