How do you know that God exists?  How do you know that God loves you?  These questions, upon the hearts of so many, have answers as real as the formative moments in your life.

As I have aged I seem to grow more and more prone to nostalgia.  Many of us do this instinctively, clinging to memories past, perhaps looking backwards with the hope of seeing a purpose for our lives.  When I travel to India, I make it a point to revisit time and again those significant marking points of my own life.  As I recall these moments past but not forgotten, I hear the gentle voice of the God very much in the present.  And God says, “I was there.”  “When on you were on your bike contemplating suicide, I was there.  When you were but nine years old and your grandmother died, I arranged for her gravestone to hold in time the very verse that would lead you to conversion.  I was there.”

It is often in these harrowing moments—your parents’ divorce, your child’s birth, the death of a loved one—where God leaves a defining mark.  There is reason you remember such moments so vividly.  We have a choice to hear or to ignore, but regardless his voice cries out in our memories, “I was there.”  God has been in our past.  God is here today.  God will be there in our future.

God exists, as Lewis worded it so well, in the “eternal now.”  And the psalmist, always writing with feet firmly planted in time, but arms ever reaching for the eternal, beautifully explains, “Thou art God from age to age the same.”  And while hindsight is often God’s means of gently revealing his presence all along, we can be comforted in the peril of the moment nonetheless.  As we encounter these markers in time, our sorrow is held in the beautiful mystery of one who wept with a friend, who answered her question “Where were you?” with tears of his own.  Beside Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus offered Mary a glimpse of the present love of God, though he knew a greater future.  God was with you then.  God is there with you now.  And He loves you.

William Shakespeare once reasoned, “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.”  How do you know that God loves you?  While you and I were yet lost and wandering, Christ was wandering after us, by way of the Cross.  And this sacrifice stands as the greatest marker in all time.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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On any given week, three to five biographies make The New York Times best-seller list for non-fiction. Though historical biographies have changed with time, human interest in the genre is long-standing. The first known biographies were commissioned by ancient rulers to assure records of their accomplishments. The Old Testament writings, detailing the lives of patriarchs, prophets, and kings, are also some of the earliest biographies in existence. Throughout the Middle Ages, biographical histories were largely in the hands of monks; lives of martyrs and church fathers were recorded with the intention of edifying readers for years to come. Over time and with the invention of the printing press, biographies became increasingly influential and widely read, portraying a larger array of lives and their stories.

The popularity of the genre is understandable. As writer Thomas Carlyle once said, “Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.” Such books are pleasant because in reading the accounts of men and women in history, we find ourselves living in many places. They are profitable because in doing so, we hear fragments of our own stories. The questions and thoughts we considered our own suddenly appear before us in the life of another. The afflictions we find wearying are given meaning in the story of one who overcame much or the life of one who found hope in the midst of loss. Perhaps we move toward biography because we seem to know that life is too short to learn only by our own experience.

Christianity embraces a similar thought. The most direct attempt in Scripture to define faith is done so by the writer of Hebrews. The eleventh chapter begins, “Now faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see.” To be honest, it is a definition that has always somewhat eluded me, and I was thankful to read I am not alone. John Wesley once observed of the same words, “There appears to be a depth in them, which I am in no wise able to fathom.” Perhaps recognizing the weight and mystery of faith and the difficulty of defining it, the writer of Hebrews immediately moves from this definition to descriptions of men and women who have lived “sure of hope” and “certain of the unseen.” From Noah and Abraham, to Rahab and saints left unnamed, we find faith moving across the pages of history, the gift of God sparkling in the eyes of the faithful, the hope by which countless lives were guided. In this brief gathering of biographies, the writer seems to tell us that faith is understood practically as much as philosophically, and that our own faith is more fully understood by looking at lives God has changed long before ours. For in between the lives that describe any faithful man or woman is the vicarious humanity of the Son of God who makes faith possible in the first place.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Reading Between the Lives →

Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic Magazine, described his life-long struggle with anxiety in an article written in 2014. With incredible candor, Stossel described some of the most debilitating experiences with his illness:

“I wish I could say that my anxiety is a recent development, or that it is limited to public speaking. It’s not. My wedding was accompanied by sweating so torrential that it soaked through my clothes and by shakes so severe that I had to lean on my bride at the altar, so as not to collapse. At the birth of our first child, the nurses had to briefly stop ministering to my wife, who was in the throes of labor, to attend to me as I turned pale and keeled over… On ordinary days, doing ordinary things—reading a book, lying in bed, talking on the phone, sitting in a meeting, playing tennis—I have thousands of times been stricken by a pervasive sense of existential dread and been beset by nausea, vertigo, shaking, and a panoply of other physical symptoms… Even when not actively afflicted by such acute episodes, I am buffeted by worry.”(1)

While I often worry, I have never experienced the kind of crippling anxiety that Stossel describes in his article, or that I frequently hear about from dozens of individuals in search of relief from chronic anxiety. Yet many of us feel as if we are always on edge or we sense an underlying feeling of dread. For our world is often a very frightening place. Indeed, the time that we live in has been described as the “age of anxiety.” Perhaps this is true, in part, because our 24/7 access to technology ensures that we are immersed in global images and headlines of terrorism, epidemics, the threat of environmental collapse, violent crimes, economic woes, international conflict, and political strife. Particularly in the West, the incidence of anxiety-related diagnoses are increasing among individuals of all ages, including among teenagers, college-students and young adults who have grown up in a technological age full of anxiety-producing images.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Age of Anxiety →

They told me to give it three weeks. “Your eyes and your brain are getting reacquainted again,” he said. “Your eyesight will fluctuate for the next few days.” Less than a week after eye surgery, I was tired of fluctuating. At times my vision was so crisp that it was almost too much for me—like I was somehow seeing more than I should. But this clarity came and went; I was sometimes far-sighted, sometimes near-sighted, sometimes neither very well. Perfect sight was not as immediate as I anticipated.

My inhabiting of faith and belief is not so far from this. Fittingly, I was given the charge of writing about my meandering path toward Christian belief the same week of my eye surgery. The reflective task of peering into my life, looking at patterns and history with the hope of illumination seemed ironic as I squinted to see my computer screen. But it served as a helpful metaphor. My vision of Jesus has been far from immediate. It has been much closer to a fluctuating timeline of beholding and squinting, seeing, not-seeing, and straining to see. My experience has been something more like the blind man’s from Bethsaida:

“Do you see anything?” Jesus asks after placing his hands on the man’s eyes.

The man looks up and says, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”

Jesus puts his hands once more on the man’s eyes, and then “his eyes were opened; his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”(1)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Lightening the Darkness →

For some people, the fear of sleep accompanies the fear of death. For some, the fear of not being awake is akin to the fear of not being. Public Radio International personality Ira Glass spent a program discussing his own fear of sleep, along with others who find something worrisome in the altered, vulnerable state of slumber: “I’d lie awake at night scared to go to sleep,” says Glass of himself as a child. “‘Cause sleep seemed no different than death, you know? You were gone. Not moving, not talking, not thinking. Not aware. Not aware. What could be more frightening? What could be bigger?”(1)

Others describe a similar sense of foreboding in the still of night that is irrationally paralyzing for them: a seven year-old trains himself to resist sleep, a young student describes her extensive intake of caffeine and denial. But one man, speaking bluntly of the fear of death in the middle of the night, attests to the altogether rational quality of his fear. “It’s not an irrational fear… You understand that you’re a mortal; your life is going to be over at some point. You’re fighting the worst enemy in the world as you lie there in bed….you’re trying to fight death and there’s no way you can win.”(2)

Glass closes the program with an excerpt of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” a poem about waking at 4 a.m. and staring around the bedroom, and seeing “what’s really always there:/ Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,/ Making all thought impossible but how/ And where and when I shall myself die.” Larkin, who died a bleak philosopher at 63, continues:

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says no rational being

Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing

that this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Theology of Sleep →

“I like to listen,” said Ernest Hemingway. “I have learned a great deal from listening carefully.”

Hemingway speaks of a significant virtue, lamenting accurately, “Most people never listen.”

I wonder if he would feel differently if it were his books to which people were listening.

The popularity of audio books is redefining the notion of reading, and some authors—and readers—are unhappy about it. “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” says literary critic Harold Bloom. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” Others who doggedly defend the entire experience of reading—the feel of a book in their hands, the smell of its pages, the single-minded escape of delving into a story—find listening to a book something akin to cheating. “You didn’t read it,” they contest; “you only listened to it”—as if this somehow means they took in a different story.

For those who love the written word and printed page, for those who are elated at the sight of a bookstore, not only is listening to Hamlet or The Count of Monte Cristo something like picking up the cliff notes, e-books are almost equally offensive. There is no substitute for books, no surrogate for reading.

I mostly agree. I find myself responding to the question, “Have you read such and such?” with a similar admittance of guilt: “Well, I listened to it” (usually accompanied with a comment about Atlanta traffic). And yet, I am becoming more and more convinced that audio books definitely have their place in learning—with or without traffic. Auditory processing is vital to any learning. Hemingway is right; listening carefully is a vital skill to keep sharp.

I find that I pick up different facets when I listen to a paragraph than I might have gleaned from reading that same paragraph. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is a book I have read many times. When I bought the book on CD, however, I found listening to the work an entirely different, altogether helpful experience. Interestingly, Mere Christianity began as a series of lectures for the radio, perhaps amplifying its effectiveness as an audio book. And yet some words are simply powerful whether heard internally or aloud.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In Defense of Listening →

In the 1930s, a vine native to Japan was introduced throughout the United States as a highly effective means for controlling erosion. Forty years later, the USDA officially declared this miracle-vine a weed. While visitors to the South are immediately taken by scenic glimpses of kudzu-blanketed landscapes, natives keep their doors shut to keep the creeping plant from taking over their houses. Growing better in the South than it does even in its native environment, kudzu can grow as much as a foot per day, climbing trees, barns, telephone poles—and anything else that gets in its way. And while these vines actually do help prevent erosion, they also destroy entire forests, wrapping themselves around every inch, smothering every tree from needed sunlight.

The chronicles of southern kudzu came to mind at a similar story in recent headlines. The article describes an isolated farm village in the mountains of northern Mexico that has been about the work of recruiting cats. Attempting to counter a frightening population of rats for a town of 3,000 (health officials estimate as many as 500,000 rats in this small village), some believe importing cats is the most logical solution. But as “cat donations” begin to accumulate steadily, others are less sure it is a foolproof plan. Stray cats that haven’t been sterilized may only create more problems. Their plague of rats, some warn, may quickly be replaced by a plague of cats.

Does it ever feel like life is a similar testing ground of creative or destructive gardening, trial and error, cause and effect? What do you do when the attitude you attempted to import to control false hope somehow becomes a growing spirit of sarcasm? Or the vow you made to silence your critical words seems to evolve into a mounting plague of unvoiced frustration? Sometimes it feels like we are only bouncing between extremes, pulling weeds only to transplant them, working on the leak in one corner only to find we’ve sprung a leak in another.

Christianity can introduce a life that is not much different than problem-solving with cats and kudzu. Like the vines brought in to counter one problem, we, too, can easily end up introducing another. Fighting to counter our inattentiveness to this or that virtue, we might battle laziness and lethargy or struggle to correct our time and routine, only to find that as victory seems to loom in the garden the battle is now against a quickly creeping sense of self-righteousness. The plague of the weeds of apathy is easily replaced by an infestation of arrogance.

Jesus, who regularly countered apathy with active commands, seemed also to know well our capacity for self-righteousness, warning hearers to be on guard against the “yeast of the Pharisees.” It is all too often the weed that creeps in and takes over while we believed we were planting better fruit (and very well may have been). He also warned that our adversary is like an enemy who comes and sows weeds among the wheat while everyone is sleeping. And often, this mystery gardener may well be ourselves. Jesus who spoke thoroughly of seeds and sowing was well aware that tending the weeds of materialism or immorality or fear may simply leave us open to the planting of idolatry of a different varietal.

With these teachings in mind, C.S. Lewis once commented that errors often come in pairs. Our adversary, he writes, “always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking about which is the worse. […] He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.”(1) It is a struggle that calls us to be faithfully self-aware, lest we oscillate from one weed to another. “But do not let us be fooled” writes Lewis. “We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through both errors.”

And at this, the goal of course is Christ—nothing less, nothing added—not Christian truth, not Christian charity, but Christ himself. The goal is Christ, who walks at our side even as we find ourselves struggling to hike through the weeds we have created, the idol varietals we have simply exchanged, the plague where there was once a pest. “But you are of Christ,” the apostle Paul reminds, “and Christ is of God.” Wherever we find ourselves, this is our hope: that even in our oscillating we are being tilled and cultivated by the Spirit into the image of the one who created us. God is at work; God is the first and most able Gardner, and to this hope the Christian clings, lost in wonder, love, and praise. For after the first few steps of the Christian life and well into the journey of new creation, we realize that creeping vines and mounting plagues can be uprooted and transformed to beauty only in his able hands.

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

(1) The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2002), 100.

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Swedish chemist Alfred Bernhard Nobel was once largely known as a maker and inventor of explosives. In 1866 Nobel invented dynamite, which earned him both fame and the majority of his wealth. At one point in his life he held more than 350 patents, operated labs in 20 countries, and had more than 90 factories manufacturing explosives and ammunition. Yet today he is most often remembered as the name behind the Nobel Prize, the most highly regarded of international awards for efforts in peace, chemistry, physics, literature, and economics.

In 1888 a bizarre incident occurred, which seemed to have afforded Alfred Nobel an unlikely opportunity for reflection. Many believe it was this event that ultimately led to his establishment of the Nobel Prize and subsequent change in his reputation. Alfred’s brother Ludvig died while staying in Cannes, France, but the French newspapers mistakenly confused the two brothers, reporting the death of the inventor of explosives. One paper’s headline read brusquely: “Le marchand de la mort est mort”—the merchant of death is dead.

I can’t imagine reading the headlines of my life written at the hands of my harshest critic, but I do remember laboring over an assignment in middle school in which I was required to write my own obituary. Some of the class was given the task of writing it as if they died well into their eighties; others had to write as if they died that year. The assignment was meant to incite reflection, and in most of us it did—particularly those of us who were designated early deaths. As in the case with Alfred Nobel, my premature obituary suggested headlines I did not want to live with; that I was the one writing them made this all the more sobering.

In a very real sense, I am still (as is each of us) the writer of my own obituary. But I am no longer thinking about the words and headlines in the way I was thinking about them in middle school. As I struggled to find the words, it seemed I had so little material with which to work—no graduations, no family, no accomplishments worth mentioning, no humanitarian contributions, no overarching purpose for my life. I was imagining all the things I had not done and feeling quite insignificant about the things I had. At that point in time, it seemed clear that a few more years were necessary in order to make a meaningful headline.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Breaking Headlines →

For most of us, the study of doctrine is best left to academics and theologians.  Terms used in doctrinal formulations like supralapsarian, infralapsarian, incompatiblism, predestination, or compatibalism either leave us tongue-tied, confused, or totally disinterested. If we wonder at all, we wonder what doctrine has to do with our day-to-day lives, especially as we struggle with terms we don’t understand and principles we find hard to practice.  If we’re honest, reading and studying theology is something most of us would like to avoid, just as we’d like to avoid a root canal.

Historically, of course, the formation of Christian doctrine served to tell the story of the gospel.  Doctrines are composed of the central tenets of belief, so an understanding of doctrine shapes what Christians think about our faith.  But how many Christians have really taken the time to think through the implication(s) or application(s) of doctrine to the living out of our lives?  In other words, is a belief something we only think in our heads?  Or is a belief something we demonstrate in our lives?  More important, if what we think in our heads has no bearing over the ways in which we live in this world, do we truly believe?

I was forced to think about these questions, as I studied the doctrine of the Incarnation. By its very nature, the doctrine of the Incarnation is application-oriented since it deals with the belief that in Jesus Christ the whole fullness of God dwelt bodily.  The more I thought about the Incarnation,the more I realized that doctrine needs to be similarly incarnational.  Doctrine must be “enfleshed” in our very beings, just as our skin encases our bones and organs.

Another way of thinking about incarnational doctrine is to think about eating.  Food sustains our very being and fuels us for living. In the same way, as we digest ideas, they should emerge as a part of ourvery being, just as food nourishes and sustains us by being incorporated into our cells, tissue, and organs.  Infact, being intentional about the implications of the Incarnation can help our understanding of the true nature of doctrine—as lived belief.

Of course the preeminent example of incarnation is in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. But incarnational doctrine begins all the way back in the Old Testament.  God comes to be with his people in their wilderness wanderings as a pillar of fire and a cloud.  God “dwells” among the people in the Ark of the Covenant, and then in the Tabernacle.  Later, the Temple became the incarnational focal point of God’s presence with God’s people.

Other vivid and concrete images of incarnation occur in the lives of the Hebrew prophets.  In the book of Ezekiel, the prophet is told “Son of man, eat what you find; eat this scroll and go, speak to the house of Israel” (cf. Ezekiel 2:9-3:3). This scroll is not just any scroll.  It is the book of the Law,the Scriptures, the teachings and the doctrines of belief that guided the nation in its worship of God.  Ronald Rolheiser suggests a profound incarnational application for this image: “The idea is that they should digest the word and turn it into their own flesh so that people will be able to see the word of God in a living body rather than on a dead parchment….We have to digest something and turn it, physically, into the flesh of our own bodies so it becomes part of what we look like.  If we would do this with the word of God, others would not have to [only] read the Bible to see what God is like,they would need only to look at our faces and our lives to see God.”(1)

Could it be that we could so imbibe and ingest doctrine a the beautiful teachings that come from God’s word into our lives, that they would radiate from our faces?  That the way we lived, spoke, acted—even our very countenance—would give witness to the truth of God’s word?  This is incarnation application.  We incarnate God’s word, God’s truth and love, as our lives bear witness to Him.  Doctrine is lived out, and our beliefs are enfleshed in our deeds and our actions, and even in our words.  As St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the word of God wherever you go, even use words, if necessary.”(2)

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

(1) Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for Christian Spirituality (New York: DoubledayBooks, 1999), 102.

(2) Ibid., 82.

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On a routine trip through well-worn streets, I found myself pulled out of the fragmented consciousness of a mind captive to the day’s worries with the jarring lyrics of a song. Up until that point, the song itself was much like the familiar patterns of scenery, an external factor impervious to the siege of my own fears; I was seeing but not seeing, hearing but not really hearing. But then I suddenly took in the artist’s abrupt words: “Hoping to God on high is like clinging to straws while drowning.”(1)

The simile cleared everything else from my mind and set me thinking about the descriptive words of a friend just hours earlier. Encouraging me in the midst of a difficult place, she simply reminded me that I was not alone. She was intending to assure me of her friendship and support, but I also knew she was assuring me of the presence of God. “The LORD is near to all who call on him,” declares the psalmist; and I needed to hear it.

There are many who take comfort in the thought that God is among us, comforting our fears, quieting our cries of distress, standing near those who call, moving in lives and history that we might discover the God who is there. Knowing that Christ is near in struggle and darkness is one of the only reasons I don’t completely surrender to my fears and stop moving forward. Knowing that there is a kingdom of grace, beauty, and mystery is the hope I remember when I fear death, my console when I fear uncertainty, the picture that somehow makes sense of a strand of DNA and quiets my fear of being uncared for and alone.  I can relate to the resolution of the psalmist in a world of many and distant gods: “But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign LORD my refuge.”

But what good is it if there is a throne but it is empty, a kingdom without a king, or worse, a god who is close but like straw? Who is it who is near us?  If god is an impersonal force, or a tyrant, or a distant, semi-interested being, the kingdom is no refuge. If the hope we cling to is like straw that cannot save us from drowning, we have good reason to live in fear, “huddled,” as the musician later describes, “afraid if we dance we might die.”

The lyrics that brought my distraction to a grinding halt forced me to think graphically about the hope to which the Christian really clings, the promise that is so often on the mouth of God in Scripture:  Do not be afraid, for I am with you.(2) If God on high is merely straw and fairytale, then emptiness is inevitable, fear is certain, and hope is futile, for we are ultimately alone. We all cling futilely to fantasy and drown in delusion. Could there really be one both graceful and near enough to answer the cry of a lonely heart, the fears of an entire nation, the uncertainties of the world around?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Not Alone →

There is a covered bridge in Georgia that extends over a scenic rushing stream. A well-worn trail leads its visitors to a succession of small cascading waterfalls over a series of massive rocks. Sitting atop one of these rocks, my husband turned to me and asked, “Do you ever think of the springs in France when you see a bottle of Evian for sale?”

My answer caught me more off guard than his question. No, I really hadn’t ever thought of the springs, or the production, or for that matter, the importing that goes into the twenty-some kinds of bottled water we see on our grocery store shelves. In fact, I don’t usually think about the origins of anything I consume.

Sociologists call this growing trend of perspective (or lack there of) commodification, the progression of thought whereby the commodities we consume are seen in abstraction from their origins. For instance, when most of us think of chocolate, we rarely see it as having a context beyond our consumption of it. The land where it came from, the conditions of its production, and the community or laborers who produce it are realities disassociated with the commodity. In a world dominated by consumption, commodification is becoming more and more of an unconscious worldview, and one which is shaping habits of interpretation across the board.

Author and cultural observer Vincent Miller writes of how such a manner of seeing and interpreting is also making us more comfortable with engaging religion as commodity, lifting certain portions of a religious tradition from its context and historical background for the sake of one’s individual use or interest.(1) Thus just as chocolate or bottled water is easily and unconsciously viewed as detached and even different from its origin and context, parts and pieces of religious traditions are increasingly being seen as goods from which we can pick and choose, commodities disassociated from the historical realities and contexts from which they arise. Such habits of interpretation might explain the current fascination with diverse and isolated spiritual practices; it could also explain the man on television who recently expressed his desire to design a tattoo portraying his version of the Crucifixion. Jesus, the cross, and the resurrection become commodities isolatable from first century Palestine, detachable from the context of the Old Testament, or optionally a part of the Christian story at all. When consuming religion, we prefer à la carte.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Jesus à la Carte →

Master photographer Edward Steichen once remarked that the mission of photography is to explain human to human and each to him or herself. It was a mission he found at once both complicated and naïve, but worth fumbling toward. “Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper,” notes Steichen. “The photographer begins with the finished product.”

It is a thought befitting of a scene from 2001, when the who’s who of the country’s finest photographers volunteered their time for such a mission. What they discovered is that when the “finished products” are the faces of children in foster care systems across the country, photography can offer can explain human to human in a way that offers the chance of new life.

Diane Granito is the founder of the Heart Gallery, a unique program that uses photography to help find homes for older foster children, sibling groups, and other children who are traditionally difficult to place with families.(1) The program started in New Mexico in 2001 at the suggestion of a local photographer. Space was then donated by a prominent gallery in the city, where more than a thousand people came opening night. The photos on exhibit were the end result of the photographers’ attempts to coax out the unique personalities in hundreds of children—a great contrast to the typical photos attached to a child’s file. “They look like mug shots,” said one of the photographers of the typical case photos. “This is an opportunity to just portray them as kids in their environments,” said another involved. “We’re treating this as a living, breathing project.”

Since its inception, the Santa Fe project has inspired 120 more Heart Galleries across the United States. In some places, the adoption rate after an exhibit is more than double the nationwide rate of adoption from foster care. Such photography earns a description worthy of its roots: photography in Greek means “to write in light.”

Those who work to find foster children adoptive families are used to rubbing up against the public perception that most foster children have serious emotional and behavioral problems. Sometimes, though not always, it is an accurate perception. And a picture offered in a different light does not change the child it portrays. But an image of a troubled child at play does offer the accurate light of hope.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Human to Human →

Professor and theologian James Loder was on vacation with his family when they noticed a motorist off to the side of the road waving for help. In his book The Transforming Moment, he describes kneeling at the front fender of this broken-down car, his head bent to examine the flat tire, when he was startled by the abrupt sound of screeching brakes. A motorist who had fallen asleep at the wheel was jarred awake seconds before his vehicle crashed into the disabled car alongside the road—and the man who knelt beside it. Loder was immediately pinned between two vehicles. The car he knelt to repair was now on his chest, his own vehicle underneath him.

Years after both the incident and the rehabilitation it required, Loder was compelled to describe the impact of that moment so marked by pain and tragedy, which was unexpectedly, something much more. Loder describes the incident: “At the hospital, it was not the medical staff, grateful as I was for them, but the crucifixes—in the lobby and in the patients’ rooms—that provided a total account of my condition. In that cruciform image of Christ, the combination of physical pain and the assurance of a life greater than death gave objective expression and meaning to the sense of promise and transcendence that lived within the midst of my suffering.”(1)

For the Christian, the crucifixion is the center of the whole, the event that gives voice to a broken, dark, and dying world, and the paradoxical suggestion of life somehow within it. The Christian marks steeples and graves in memory of the crucifixion. The death of Christ is the occasion that makes way for the last to be first, the guilty to be pardoned, the creature united again to its creator. The cross of Christ is the mysterious sign that stands in the center of the history of the world and changes everything. “I have been crucified with Christ,” said one of his transformed followers. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Through Still Deeper Darkness →

As one who spends a fair bit of time sitting in airports, I have the opportunity to people watch. There are the elite travelers who emerge from airline lounges with their power suits and designer cases, and then there are those who are traveling for leisure, souvenirs and gifts in tow. I love seeing the variety of clothing styles depending on what region I am in, and listening in on conversations betrays regional dialects and phrases. Business deals are made or broken, discussions over the day’s events all done in the parlance of the place.

More often than not, my attention is drawn to those who sit alone, as I do. In the smaller, regional airports I see the elderly gentleman in the wheelchair, alone. I look at the gate agent as she texts on her phone after yet another flight delay, hoping to hide from the ire of the passengers who needed to arrive at their destination hours ago. There is the single mother trying to corral her children, the slouched, sad looking twenty-something with a melancholic and listless gaze. There we all sit waiting. Wondering. Is there anything more than this?

The inherent routine, mundane tasks and waiting for whatever is next on the agenda can fill the days with a deepening ennui and a longing for something greater—something like a sense of finding and fulfilling one’s potential. As one who sits anonymously in airports watching and waiting, what does “potential” even mean? In a world of social media where status is measured by the number of friends or followers, likes or shares there is often a feeling that one’s life just doesn’t measure up. And in a celebrity culture, where success is measured by beauty, wealth, or status how can one ever feel she has reached her potential? If the exceptional is the guide for achievement, how will those of us who live somewhere between the average and the ordinary ever feel we’ve arrived?

Most of us occupy an existence often filled with the mundane or the banal. Never ending housework, constant bills, and running endless errands do not make one feel substantial. These are the daily details that make up often dulling routines. Indeed, for artists and bus drivers, homemakers and neurosurgeons, astronauts and cashiers repetitive motion is more the norm than moments of great challenge or extraordinary success. With endless quotidian tasks, is it any wonder that reaching one’s potential serves as an ideal to free us from the constraints of such ordinary lives?

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