Joy and Strength (Christian life and music)

Did you know that there is an ultimate, true Reality?  There is also the reality of what we can see, touch, and feel. I have been asking the Lord a lot lately to please reveal more of His Reality to me.  This is because like you, I can get bogged down in the earthly, daily "reality" of life. The Lord tells us to hope in Himself.  When we hope in earthly things, accomplishments, places, people, and things, we miss the mark.  Did you know that that is the literal definition of the word sin?  To miss the mark, as in when we aim an arrow at the target and miss. How to straddle Reality and reality?  After all we are not in heaven quite yet.  We live in these earthen vessels for now with all of their issues and problems.  We do not waft on a cloud of perfect peace most days.  At least I don't. Instead, I welcome anxiety and confusion.  "Come on in!" I say.  But they do not have a place in the life and heart of a Christ-follower. ...

Why do we need faith?  Because life is meaningless without it.  That's the broad, overarching reason for it. We also need a daily, everyday, kind of faith - for days add up to weeks, months, years, and a lifetime. Faith is a substance.  This is a hard truth to conceptualize.  It is also evidence.  Now evidence is usually tangible, provable, rock solid in its nature. So faith is proven evidence, it has a substance to it.  It is not some pie in the sky, wishful thinking, or dreamlike state.  It is as real as reality gets! Faith has an end, so to speak.  We believe for something to happen - we pray about it, wait on God for it, trust Him to do what only He can do - and when He does, there you have it: the evidence of things unseen.  "It really happened!"  Yes.  No coincidence.  No reasoning it out or using science to back it up.  It just is.  Our faith made sight. I have seen God answer so many prayers - I have 34 years'...

Everything's weird because we're all pretending that it's not.  We're trying to do life as usual, but there's nothing usual about what we are experiencing during this pandemic. I'm sitting here watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and it is surreal.  I mean I'm glad they're still having it.   But no one is there. The streets are empty. Everyone is singing and dancing as if  everything is normal.   But it's not. And underneath all the "festivities," it just feels so sad to me.  It's as if we all want it to be like it once was.   It's nice that they want to still have the parade, to "keep our spirits up," but it all feels really hollow to me.   They just showed an overhead shot of the Brooklyn Bridge and it was eerily bereft of traffic.  To think of the millions of New Yorkers who are in the habit of complaining about the traffic - how they all must yearn to have the chaos of the hustle and bustle of the traffic o...