Just Continue That Thought...

A thought by Max Lucado (2012-02-06) from his book, Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (p. 72). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.) We had a major storm here in sunny California last Friday.   Earlier in the week, it was beautiful.   I loved it.   I didn’t choose what happened on Friday.   But it still came. Max says, “Whether or not storms come, we cannot choose. But where we stare during a storm, that we can.”   He goes on, “I found a direct example of this truth while sitting in my cardiologist’s office. My heart rate was misbehaving, taking the pace of a NASCAR race and the rhythm of a Morse code message. So I went to a specialist. After reviewing my tests and asking me some questions, the doctor nodded knowingly and told me to wait for him in his office. “I didn’t like being sent to the principal’s office as a kid. I don’t like being sent to the doctor’s office as a patient. But I...

A thought by Max Lucado (2012-02-06) from his book, Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (p. 60). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.) Being a parent can be such a fearful thing to be, can't it? Look at this verse in Lamentations 2: 19: “Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift your hands toward Him for the life of your young children” Max says, “Prayer is the saucer into which parental fears are poured to cool. Jesus says so little about parenting, makes no comments about spanking, breast-feeding, sibling rivalry, or schooling. Yet his actions speak volumes about prayer. Each time a parent prays, Christ responds. His big message to moms and dads? Bring your children to me. Raise them in a greenhouse of prayer.” Max shares this story, “Some years ago I witnessed a father taking this priority seriously during a Sunday morning worship service. As we took communion, I heard a small boy a...

A thought by Max Lucado (2012-02-06) from his book, Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (p. 46). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.) Here is the whole paragraph that Max puts this thought.   It says, “Jesus doesn’t condemn legitimate concern for responsibilities but rather the continuous mind-set that dismisses God’s presence. Destructive anxiety subtracts God from the future, faces uncertainties with no faith, tallies up the challenges of the day without entering God into the equation. Worry is the darkroom where negatives become glossy prints.”   Wow! He goes on, “A friend saw an example of perpetual uneasiness in his six-year-old daughter. In her hurry to dress for school, she tied her shoelaces in a knot. She plopped down at the base of the stairs and lasered her thoughts on the tangled mess. The school bus was coming, and the minutes were ticking, and she gave no thought to the fact that her father was s...