“It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. . . and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Nelson Mandela


     Is that true for you? Do you fear that others will recognise your glory or that they will see who you really are and be disappointed? As Christians, I think that we fear going this direction because it sounds like pride. But isn’t there a difference? 
     On our own, pride is dangerous. Mandela however is not describing that. He is telling us, awakening us to the reality that IN God we have glory. In God we were made for glory! A recognition of greatness bestowed is not pride, for that recognition points the glory right back to our Creator.

     The thing is, recognising our glory is the only thing that allows us to love extravagantly. Loving from a position of weakness hinders our ability to love because we’re always in a position of protection, guarding against further pain.

     Realising and accepting who we are in Christ should remove that fear.

Buddhism and “Don't Touch Me”

I can't find the site now but I ran across a post by a woman who went with her husband to the far east. Thailand or something like that. She relates how, at the end of a visit with some Buddhist monks, they just kind of waved good-bye “because Buddhist monks are not allowed to touch women.”

Wow, isn't it Christianity that usually takes the hit for seeing women as less than? And isn't Christianity based upon the teaching of Jesus?

Jesus, the One who allowed prostitutes to wash His feet and anoint Him with oil.

Jesus, the One who touched dead bodies to bring them back to life

Jesus, the One who touched grieving widows to comfort them

Jesus, the One who touched those with leprosy to make the clean

Jesus, the One who touched a woman with internal bleeding to bring her relief


Jesus, the One who touched and healed the blind and deaf, and demon-possessed, and lame and crippled. He touched these people and personally connected with them.

Jesus, the One who taught women and invited them in to His inner circle.

Jesus, the One who broke all these man-made rules about what to touch and not touch, the One who raised women to their original state of equality with men and then said, “Follow Me, be like Me, do what I did in your relationships with others.

In a world where even in the 21^st century women are treated as second class (I read last year that those bastions of feminist movements, Universities, are the worst offenders for pay inequity), and social distinctions are as clear as ever, Jesus and His teaching give us, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for in our relationship with Jesus we are all one and the same,” (Galatians 3:28).

Because of Jesus, both the Old and the Newer Testament descriptions of Him show us that all people regardless of race, gender, class or status are equal in the eyes of Jesus the Christ. 


Nobody before Jesus attempted to promote such a concept. What's more, in complete contrast to Greek and Roman societies, Jesus inspired His followers (who now formed “the Church”) to “take care of widows.” In those days, if a woman did not have a husband or sons to take care of her, she did not have any means of support. 


In the Greek and Roman societies of the time it was very unlikely that men would be punished for even killing their wives. In complete contrast Christian men were taught to be ready to die for their wives, to be faithful to their wives, and in fact to model submission for their wives. Did you hear that last one? Unlike any other teacher before Him or since, Jesus told men then as He tells us today, that as the head of the home, as the leader, the teacher, rather than demand from our families the following, we men are to model for our families submission, forgiveness, patience, mercy and kindness and to remain with our wives for life, ensuring and providing for them tender loving care – not because they are somehow less-than, but because this is what it looks like to “Love one another as I have loved you.”This is servant leadership.


Islam, Buddhism, and all other man-made religions have rules about not interacting with women as equals; somehow blaming them for a man's impure thoughts. Jesus sets things right.

The Buddhist monks thought that not touching a woman would somehow keep them pure, but Jesus says to His followers, “Since you died with Christ, why do you submit to its rules, “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom with their self-imposed worship, their false humility, but they lack and value in restraining sexual indulgence.” Colossians 2:20-23

“Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless to the world, and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued by the world.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“I’ve Already Been There”

That’s what Jesus says to us when we stumble into yet another challenging area of life. Whenever uncertainty overtakes us, Jesus says, “It’s going to be ok. I’ve been here before. I’ll walk with you and show you the way.”

That’s one of the reasons why Jesus came as a human - to show us the way home. He knows our longing, our desires, our fears and insecurities. He knows loss. He knows temptation. He knows disappointment, rejection. He knows being lied to, being used and abused. Jesus knows exhaustion and poverty and pain and to love those who are not available.

No matter how hard the road, Jesus has been there before you. 

In every atheist there is a Salieri to our Mozart as God’s chosen people. As Salieri said to God (in the movie), “From now on we are enemies, you and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy (isn’t that exactly how atheists view Christians?) . . . You are unjust, unfair, unkind (isn’t that exactly how atheist view Creator God?)! I will block You. I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature here on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your incarnation.”

Alert and Oriented

My cousin runs an Ambulance Company. He said that when they respond to a trauma victim the first thing they ascertain is the level of coherence in the victim. The best is alert and oriented times four. The person knows:

Who s/he is

Where they are

What time of day it is

What happened

As a marriage counsellor, I often encounter clients who are alert and oriented times zero. They’ve forgotten who they are in Christ. They have no idea how close they are losing everything they hold dear. They don’t know how late in the game it is and they have no idea how they got to that point and they don’t know that God allowed it for a reason.

I’ve said before that the suffering and loss and pain that we experience in life and in marriages or other relationships bring to the surface the worst of who we are. In times of stress and difficulty the most repugnant of our characteristics float to our awareness. Allowing or causing suffering and tragedy is God’s way of giving us the opportunity to let Him change who we are. When we see the reflection of who we are, a reflection that is brought to our awareness by difficulties we have one of two avenues. Alarmed by what they see, those in an intimate relationship with Jesus cry out, “Go deeper Lord. Dig it all out. Change me. Heal me. Make me who You want me to be.”

The other avenue that some people take is to embrace the evil; they become the evil. They have the affair, hit the child, call their spouse degrading names, leave the marriage, abandon the children.

Let Jesus raise your consciousness. Let Him bring you back to life. Let Jesus become your Lord and Saviour.