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Prayer, Plain and Simple

I am currently in the midst of my church’s annual 21-day consecration in which we dedicate ourselves to fasting, increased prayer, and study of the word of God. As is always the case when it comes to fasting, it brings to mind what you can and can’t eat and sometimes puts the fastee in danger…

There are many crazy stories – some actually true – about Rick Henderson, the Hall of Fame baseball player. Here’s one: Months after Henderson was paid his first one million dollar salary, his team’s accounting team couldn’t locate the withdrawal. When they asked Ricky about this, he calmly told them that he’d framed the check…

I know what you are thinking, “Isn’t it a bit early for a Thanksgiving prayer?” But in actuality, Thanksgiving, as we know it, started well before it was a national holiday associated with turkey, football and lethargy. Thankgiving was and is a state of mind in the Bible. There are many scriptures throughout the Bible that speak…

What we call “Halloween” has origin in an ancient Celtic festival to remember the dead called “Samhain.” By the 800s the Celts had become Christian and they “converted” their pagan celebration into a Christian holy day honoring those who had had died and now continued their life in heaven. They called this new synthesized celebration…

“What do you fear?” A good question on Halloween, the day of the year dedicated to agitating that singularly powerful instinctive impulse. What do you really fear?          Today will be dangerous. A car accident. A child’s cancer. A stock market crash. Dementia. Your enemy plots your demise. Surprise! This much is certain: What you…

There’s no way around it for me anymore. I can’t pass off the horror images associated with Halloween today as anything other than evil. Does anyone really imagine than an 8-year old should trick or treat dressed up as an ax murderer? All in jest of course! Have we lost our minds when we lost…

Let me admit to my skeptical readers here in this first sentence: Prayer experiments are riddled with scientific paradoxes. I get that. They prove nothing absolutely. Then again, neither do experiments in quantum reality. Do we debunk them as “not real science” because we can observe actions and reactions but can’t thoroughly explain them? Of…

Carving grotesque faces into pumpkins and lighting the cavity with a candle is a treasured American Halloween tradition. I can’t remember a October from my childhood without reliving the squeamish delight: burying my hands into the slimy guts of a big orange gourd, dishing out handfuls of wet seeds, spreading them out on newspapers to…

I drove past a Halloween lawn decoration scene that’s haunting me. I suppose that is the intent. Haunting. The picture is right out of a run-of-the-mill horror flick: a manikin dressed in a coat and tie and carrying a briefcase and a shotgun that has just blown off the front half of his face… Happy…

There is overwhelming evidence – enough to say without hesitation: Prayer is healthy for those who practice it. Aside from the question of whether or not prayer generates responses from God, we do know from scientific studies on the question that prayer does generate response within the one who prayers. Back as far as 1990,…
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