Sharing Bath Time with Scooter
Push Past Your Pain!
Can you work through the pain?
As a parent, I believe that it’s important to teach your children the importance of prayer, and seeking God in the midst of their pain. As my three year old, Mckenzie, is growing up, I’m teaching her the importance of dealing with her hurt by asking God to “heal” her and relieve her of the pain! As a result, anytime she is hurt she immediately prays, “Dear Jesus, please heal me..amen!” I’m teaching her three important lessons; the importance of prayer, the ability to pray for others, and that prayer is based on faith!
“A large crowd followed and pressed around Him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind Him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch His clothes, I will be healed.’ Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from Him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ‘You see the people crowding against you,’ His disciples answered, ‘and yet you can ask, “Who touched Me?”’ But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and knelt at His feet, and trembling with fear, told Him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering’” (Mark 5:24b-34)
Not So Good Friday
What happens when Good Friday is not so Good.
I wrote this about three years ago. I always like to go back and read it and remind myself of the reality of Good Friday:
Good Friday was not too “good” for me at all. I spent Friday afternoon playing softball on an intramural softball team. Why I am playing softball? I don’t know, but I am out there nonetheless. So, I am playing in the field and someone hits a fly ball to me and I run under it to catch it. Not only did the ball go over my head, but I stepped in a hole in the grass and severely twisted my ankle. That bad boy was hurtin’. Mind you, I’ve already broken my ankle several times, so the feeling was not welcome. I got home and limped around my apartment all day Friday doing nothing. I was feeling really blah. I hoped to wake up on Saturday rejuvenated, but when I woke up, there was much of the same feeling. My ankle was still killing me and I really didn’t want to go anywhere. I tried to do some homework for class, but I just felt tired all over. It felt like I had taken some kind of tranquilizer.
To top it off, I learned that a colleague of mine had recently died of lung cancer. He was 29 years old and graduated with me. There seemed to be so much pain and death surrounding me. Then a thought came to me. Could I be experiencing the same feelings that the disciples felt on Friday and Saturday of Holy Week? I thought about it. They had been walking with this Man for three and a half years. Now all of a sudden He was gone. They had left all to follow Him. They had nowhere else to go. He had been crucified and placed in a tomb. They saw no hope.
