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Take Time to Listen by Joyce Meyer

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Understand [this], my beloved brethren. Let every man be quick to hear…slow to speak… —James 1:19

A friend of mine lives in a large city where homelessness is a huge problem. One winter night she was coming home from work and walked by a man asking for money. It was cold and dark, and she was anxious to get home.  Not wanting to pull out her wallet in a less than safe situation, she reached deep into her purse fishing for change.  As her fingers searched in vain, the man started telling her that his coat had been stolen in the homeless shelter where he’d stayed the night before. Still trying to come up with a couple of quarters, she nodded and said, “That’s too bad”.  When she finally found the money, she dropped it into the man’s cup.  He smiled and said, “Thank you for talking with me.”  My friend realized what meant the most to that man was the fact that someone had heard him and responded.

We have a team of people from our ministry who try to help people living in the tunnels under the downtown bridge.  They have found that each of these people has a story.  Something tragic happened to them that resulted in their present circumstance.  They appreciate the sandwiches and clean clothes, but mostly they appreciate someone caring enough to actually talk with them long enough to learn about them.

Let me encourage you to take time to listen.

Love Others Today: Do you know someone who simply needs a person to talk to? Be the one who will listen.

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As Sure as the Sun – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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Although it might be less obvious in some parts of the U.S., spring is around the corner. The crocuses are ready to announce themselves; the trees are whispering of new life. Once clandestine signs of spring are beginning to defy the last attempts of winter to hang on. The seasonal underdog begins to suggest brazenly that it again will triumph. With such optimistic signs abounding, it is strange for some of us to admit we find the season of spring a sobering time of year. The once stoic world around us is about to be in full bloom; all traces of winter are about to fade. Like the thawing of a frozen Narnia, the promise of rebirth announces itself. And there is something about it that spurs reflection, maybe even dismay, every time.

Perhaps it is simply that spring is somewhat shocking after the dead contrast of winter. It comes suddenly and almost scandalously, proclaiming the definitive end of a season that once seemed to have the final word. No matter how accustomed to the dead of winter we may have become, the vigor of spring will not be stopped, and we just might not feel ready for the metaphor. When all has seemed dead or dormant for so long, the possibility of new life is almost too much of a promise to let in—like beams of sunlight unleashed on exhausted eyelids. When one’s spirit feels lifeless within them, the budding hope of a suddenly resurrected forest proclaims a story that we may not be ready to hear.

This is one reason why I am grateful as a Christian for the season of Lent. The time leading up to the promise of Easter and the hope of resurrection is something like the early signs of spring. Indications of new life spring forth all around us, each with the shocking call that we must prepare ourselves for what is coming, reflect on the place of hope via the road of suffering, and face the forces and temptations that come at us along the way. It is not always easy to prepare one’s heart for the Cross of Christ, but the changing of seasons is upon us, and in it God beckons us forward. Henri Nouwen describes the tension eloquently:

“The season of Lent, during which winter and spring struggle with each other for dominance, helps us in a special way to cry out for God’s mercy.”(1)

For forty contemplative days, the season of Lent calls followers of Jesus to the wakeful awareness that we are human, we are dust, and we are falling short, but that there is a story reaching beyond our lifetimes, beyond our deaths, and our shortcomings, speaking new life where death stings and tears flow.

On the scene of a people who had lived with God’s silence for 400 years, this Jesus suddenly and scandalously appeared like a crocus in still-thawing ground. There had not been a word from God since the prophet Malachi. The heavens were cold and silent, and hope remained dormant within time’s wintry grasp. But beneath the frozen ground of apathy, sin, and death, the Spirit of God was stirring.  Spring was on its way. Lent invites us to stay awake to the knowledge that this hope is still so: “Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth” (Hosea 6:3). If God is the maker of all creation then every season has a purpose, and today we are waiting for spring.

Of course, the journey to the Cross may take the believer through bleak and despairing seasons that make sanctification seem an unending winter. But we are being drawn to the very Cross that held the harbinger of spring and the hope of resurrection. As surely as the sun rises he will appear—again.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Henri Nouwen, A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 43.

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Immanuel – Ravi Zacharias

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Impossible to miss in any mall, grocery store, elevator, or voice mail system, Christmas music is as ubiquitous as snow in Alaska. I have yet to walk into a store this Christmas season that wasn’t playing “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” I’m sure you are familiar with the song and can hear the tune in your head: With kids jingle belling/ and everyone telling you/ “Be of good cheer,”/ It’s the most wonderful time of the year. With this music all around me, I can’t help but begin to hum along, and feel uplifted as if it truly is the most wonderful time of the year.

And yet, for many individuals, Christmas is anything but wonderful. In fact, the joviality, décor, and the music simply strike dissonant chords because of the memories, emotions, and experiences associated with this season. Families in Aurora, Colorado, Portland, Oregon and now Newtown, Connecticut in the United States feel the emptiness of loss, the hemorrhage of violence, and the undertow of grief as a result of horrific gun violence. Sadly, these kinds of tragedies—and especially these two so close to Christmas day—will mark every Christmas for those bereaved for the rest of their lives.

There are others who also grieve the loss of a loved one—not necessarily from gun violence—but from the violence of a body turned against itself through cancer or some other debilitating or destructive disease. For all of these who are grieving, Christmas reminds them of yet another empty chair. Others experience joblessness or underemployment, numbing loneliness, disappointed expectations, ruptured relationships, and rejection that twist and distort the joy of the season into a garish spectacle. Instead of uplifting them in celebration, the most wonderful time of the year seems a cruel mockery.

For all of these, and many others, the Christmas season seems more like the opening verse of Christina Rossetti’s haunting Christmas hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” In the bleak midwinter, frost wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. All the excitement, anticipation, and beauty of the season can easily be frozen by pain, disappointment and grief; instead of singing songs of joy, a bitter moan emanates like the cold, frost-bitten wind.

Yet Christians still insist through the celebration of the Advent Season that it was into this world—the world of the bleakest midwinter—God arrived. Not sheltered from grief or pain, God descended into a world where poverty, violence, and grief were a daily part of God’s human existence in the person of Jesus. Joseph and Mary, barely teenagers, were poor, and Mary gave birth to the Messiah in a strange place far from her own home. Herod the Great used his power to slaughter all the male children who were in Bethlehem under the age of two. Shepherds slept on grassy hills, their nomadic homes. Even in Jesus’s public ministry, his cousin, John the Baptist, would be beheaded. Jesus would experience rejection and eventually die a criminal’s death, with only a few, grieving women remaining at his side.

Into this world—our world of bleak midwinter—God arrives. God arrives in the midst of pain and suffering, doubt and disappointment, longing and loneliness and makes a home with us, to be alongside of us. The Gospel of John tells us that God did not stay removed from us or from our sufferings, but that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). For those who find the Christmas season far from the “most wonderful time of the year,” Immanuel, God with us, comes to be with us in our bleak midwinter, and comes to offer consolation and care in the tears of those who weep with us when we weep.

Those who rejoice and who celebrate this season as the most wonderful time of the year can demonstrate that celebration in ways that take it far beyond lights, trees and presents.  The beauty, joy, and celebration of the season can be brought to those in bleak midwinter, as those who come alongside sharing in their suffering—doing our part, giving our all, sharing our hearts.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.