Life as a Climb

By Anna Perlini

The other day some friends took me on what I thought would be a short climb. We parked the car and took a look at the summit. We got out our climbing gear and started putting on our boots and gathering what we needed in our backpacks.

It doesn’t seem that far or that difficult. Good! I thought.

During the winter I had suffered a knee injury and subsequently felt a bit out of shape. In any case, I was just looking forward to something simple.

We started walking along the path uphill and my legs soon began to hurt, I lacked breath, and all the while I was still hoping it would be a short climb. Then the path changed into a rockier, winding trail. We were still in the woods that, although green and beautiful, were enveloping us and keeping us from seeing any kind of view around us. I knew we must have been making some progress, judging by the time, but it wasn’t until we came out of the woods and stopped by a gorgeous lookout point that we could actually see the progress we’d made and the height yet to conquer in order to reach the top.

Those few minutes spent admiring the breathtaking view over the lake beneath us, taking a picture and a sip of water, encouraged us and gave us the feeling that we were doing good and making progress, even though the summit still seemed quite far.

Then the path turned into a climb. At this point I could feel myself beginning to panic a little. The sky had been gathering dark clouds, and right then a few ominous raindrops started falling, making the rock slippery. We met others along the way, some experienced climbers, some attempting it for the first time. The uncertainty of the weather made everyone feel a common trepidation. And who knows, maybe others were praying, as I was. The rain stopped but the clouds remained. It wasn’t an easy climb and it required some stretching for sure, but the view got more intriguing and majestic over time. It definitely made it worth it all.

At one point, on a particularly difficult passage, my more experienced friend whispered in my ear, “You are doing good, you know. There are others climbing today who are having a much harder time.” Those few words had a profound effect on me: they got my eyes off myself and my personal struggle. I took a look at the young girl climbing for the first time, who looked worried. She was slowly making it too, helped by her friend. I smiled at her and said a few words. Once more I realized how important encouragement can be. “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.”1

And finally, the top!

There’s always something exhilarating about reaching the summit, no matter how tough the climb, but this time a magical sense of peace inundated my soul, bringing tears to my eyes. By God’s help I made it. He was with me all along the way. He lifted me when I thought I could not make it one more step. I was now able to see the whole path that took me to the top. Many turns were needed in order to get up here, and they made the journey richer—not easier, but definitely more interesting and exciting.

On the way back to the car I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the events that have taken place in my life. When you are in the thick of the forest and on a hard uphill climb, it’s often hard to make sense of things or understand where you are standing, or, for that matter, to gather the strength and the conviction to keep going. All you can feel is the sweat, the strain, the tiredness. In that moment it’s so easy and even understandable to give up and turn back, and to be honest, a few times I have been so tempted to!

I can only thank Jesus and the power of the Word ingrained in us through years of studying and living it. Thank you also, dear friends, for the encouragement you’ve given me along the way. Your prayers, your love, and your example have definitely helped me make it this far!


1 Proverbs 25:11.

Read More

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Read More

You Raise Me Up! with portuguese subtitles

Read More

Finding Serenity - Anchor Devotional

A compilation

I have visited Calcutta, India, a place of poverty, death, and irremediable human problems. There, the nuns trained by Mother Teresa serve the poorest, most miserable people on the planet: half-dead bodies picked up from the streets of Calcutta. The world stands in awe at the sisters’ dedication and the result of their ministry, but something about these nuns impresses me even more: their serenity. If I tackled such a daunting project, I would likely be scurrying about, faxing press releases to donors, begging for more resources, gulping tranquilizers, grasping at ways to cope with my mounting desperation. Not these nuns.

Their serenity traces back to what takes place before their day’s work begins. At four o’clock in the morning, long before the sun, the sisters rise, awakened by a bell and the call, “Let us bless the Lord.” “Thanks be to God,” they reply. Dressed in spotless white saris, they file into the chapel, where they sit on the floor, Indian-style, and pray and sing together. On the wall of the plain chapel hangs a crucifix with the words, “I thirst.” Before meeting their first “client,” they immerse themselves in worship and in the love of God.

I sense no panic in the sisters who run the Home for the Dying and Destitute in Calcutta. I see concern and compassion, yes, but no obsession over what did not get done. In fact, early on in their work Mother Teresa instituted a rule that her sisters take Thursdays off for prayer and rest. “The work will always be here, but if we do not rest and pray, we will not have the presence to do our work,” she explained. These sisters are not working to complete a caseload sheet for a social service agency. They are working for God. They begin their day with him; they end their day with him, back in the chapel for night prayers; and everything in between they present as an offering to God. God alone determines their worth and measures their success.—Philip Yancey1

*

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him.2

Have you prayed and prayed and waited and waited, and still there is no manifestation?

Are you tired of seeing nothing move? Are you just at the point of giving it all up? Perhaps you have not waited in the right way.

“With patience wait.”3 Patience takes away worry.

He said He would come, and His promise is equal to His presence. Patience takes away your weeping. Why feel sad and despondent? He knows your need better than you do, and His purpose in waiting is to bring more glory out of it all. Patience takes away self-works. The work He desires is that you “believe,”4 and when you believe, you may then know that all is well. Patience takes away all want. Your desire for the thing you wish is perhaps stronger than your desire for the will of God to be fulfilled in its arrival.

Patience takes away all weakening, all wobbling. … God's foundations are steady, and when His patience is within us, we are steady while we wait. Patience gives worship. A praiseful patience sometimes “long-suffering with joyfulness”5 is the best part of it all. “Let (all these phases of) patience have her perfect work,”6 while you wait and you will find great enrichment.—C. H. P.7

*

Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in Him; and He shall bring it to pass.8

When you retire at night, you do not worry all night lest the bed break down. Neither do you hold on to something for fear of falling. Very little rest would you find in that way. No! You simply trust yourself to the bed and just rest. Thus we should trust ourselves wholly to Jesus, and “cease from our own works as God did from His.”9 “We that believe do enter into rest.” Why? Because someone else is going to do [the work] for us. God requires us to yield and trust in Him and His Word. Trust for all you need. Trust with all your heart. Trust all the time. … Commit! And then committed, trust His Word!—Mrs. Charles E. Cowman10

*

If you don’t know what to do, stop! Get quiet and wait for God to do something. The worst thing in the world you can do is to keep on going when you don’t know what to do. That was King Saul’s mistake. He kept right on going, even after he didn’t know what to do; he figured he had to keep busy and keep going no matter what—and it lost him the kingdom.11

Getting quiet before the Lord shows you have faith that God is going to handle the situation, that He’s going to take care of things for you. It shows you trust the Lord. “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You.”12 … If you’re confused, worrying, fretting, and fuming, then you’re not trusting. You don’t have the faith you ought to have. Trusting is a picture of complete rest and peace of mind, heart, and spirit. You may have to continue working, but your attitude and spirit are calm.

When you truly trust the Lord, you can have peace in the midst of storm and calm in the eye of the hurricane. That’s when your faith gets tested, in the midst of turmoil. Quietness is a sign of faith.—David Brandt Berg13

*

“Take … no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”14

The reason our Lord gives against anxiety for the future is that we have nothing to do with the future. God gives us life by days, little single days. Each day has its own duties, its own needs, its own trials and temptations, its own grief and sorrows. God always gives us strength enough for the day as He gives it, with all that He puts into it. But if we insist on dragging back tomorrow’s cares and piling them on top of today’s, our strength will not be enough for the load. God will not add strength just to humor our whims of anxiety and distrust.

So the lesson is that we should keep each day distinct and attend strictly to what it brings us. Charles Kingsley says: “Do today’s duty, fight today’s temptation, and do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things which you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.” We really have nothing to do with the future, save to prepare for it by doing with faithfulness the duties of today.

We can always get along with our heaviest load for one day till the sun goes down. Tomorrow? You may have no tomorrow; you may be in heaven. If you are here, God will be here too, and you will receive new strength sufficient for the new day.—J. R. Miller15

Published on Anchor February 2014. Read by Bethany Kelly.


1 Reaching for the Invisible God (Zondervan, 2000).

2 Psalm 37:7.

3 Romans 8:25.

4 John 6:29.

5 Colossians 1:11.

6 James 1:4.

7 Streams in the Desert, Volume 1 (Zondervan, 1965).

8 Psalm 37:5.

9 Hebrews 4:10.

10 Streams in the Desert, Volume 2 (Zondervan, 1977).

11 1 Samuel 13:7–14.

12 Isaiah 26:3.

13 God Online (Aurora Production, 2001).

14 Matthew 6:34.

15 Come Ye Apart: Meditations on the Four Gospels.

Read More

The Worldwide Flood - Geologic Evidences - Pt 2 with Dr. Andrew Snelling

Read More

The Worldwide Flood - Dr. Andrew Snelling - Origins

Read More

Remembering to Pray

By Roy Hoffman, NY Times, Feb. 4, 2014 Sometimes, toward end of day, I jog on a beach nearby on Mobile Bay. As the sun is sinking I look out at the pelicans wheeling in the sky, the fishermen on Fairhope Pier casting their nets, sailboats and channel markers changing to silhouette. Like many who make their way here to enjoy sunset, snapping photos, sipping cocktails, relaxing on benches, I find this light on water a joy to behold. I breathe deeply as I run—the Gulf Coast winter is mild, a sweatshirt enough to ward off the chill—and feel happy just to be alive. I am in good health, enjoy a loving family and many trusted friends. I have worked as journalist, novelist, teacher, had great jobs, lost others; made more money, less money. I’ve traveled the world. On this day, I sprint up a hill and come to a promontory looking out to the sweep of the bay, the horizon red and orange, and another impulse comes up in me. It is not enough to take a photo, call a friend, jot a line in my notebook, be philosophical. Like the light, the feeling is orchestral, a welling-up of emotion. I want to speak in a way that used to be easy for me as a child: silently, intensely, embracing the mysteries. I want to pray. It is a matter of remembering, after so long, just how. Lighting Sabbath candles, being bar mitzvahed, participating in the temple youth group. I grew up in Mobile with a clear sense of religious conviction. As a Jew in the Bible Belt, I was in a minority. There are 9,000 of us in Alabama, a state of four million people, a quarter of them Southern Baptist. While some Christians worried for me, even preached to me, because I was not “saved,” others were curious, respectful. I was, after all, often the only Jew they knew. As years went on, I took a course in comparative religion, enjoyed religious holidays, Passover in particular, and identified proudly with my faith. But somewhere along the way, I’d stopped truly praying. Indeed, I wasn’t so sure about God at all. The matter seemed irrelevant. I was too busy. The biggest fight I ever had with my father was shortly after I turned 21, when, drunk on a bottle of whiskey a friend had given me for my birthday, I proclaimed myself an atheist. He followed me into the backyard, and outraged, pinned me against the fence. His parents had fled Eastern Europe because of their beliefs. Who was I to dismiss them? I expressed my contempt for all that was conventional. His faith, I told him, was a crutch. An opiate. I had heard that somewhere before. In the decades that followed, awed by time’s extremes—becoming a parent, losing a parent—and feeling my own mortality, I eventually found my way back to believing, but for a long time not with the same fervor. Working as a writer for my hometown newspaper in Mobile, I was asked, in 2009, to cover the religion beat. For the next three years, until becoming a casualty of newspaper layoffs, I carried my reporter’s pad into a plenitude of Catholic and Protestant churches, Mobile’s two synagogues, a mosque, a Buddhist temple and the homes of Hindus and Baha’i. Southern Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Church of Christ, Church of God, AME, AME Zion, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Greek Orthodox, Pentecostals, Holiness, nondenominationals—the Deep South’s religiosity was everywhere. There were stories that broke my heart, like the one of a Methodist pastor in north Alabama who had to find strength in her faith when her little girl was killed in a tornado; and others that intrigued me, like the jailhouse conversion of a Klansman. I was skeptical, but deeply curious, seeing people all around me healed during a tent revival. When I shadowed a hospital chaplain, I watched patients, without doubt, perk up at his arrival. During Ramadan, invited to the home of a Turkish couple to write about their meal after a day of fasting, I not only enjoyed a rare, Middle Eastern feast in south Alabama, but also appreciated their devotion to Islam. I became fascinated by the intensity, in all varieties, of prayer. And I’ve had my share of people praying for me, never asking about my own beliefs. In Monroeville, Ala., I reported on Pilots for Christ, aviators who transport, free, cancer patients and others for treatment where needed. Before lunch, during grace, a pilot thanked God that I would enable more people to know about their mission, and asked for my divine protection. After 60 years cloistered in a convent in Mobile, four Carmelite nuns visited with me one afternoon to tell about their lives devoted to prayer. Sister Rose, Sister Marie Therese, Sister Genevieve and Sister Elias, with an average age of 80, were no longer able to sustain their community. They had just moved to a nuns retirement home. They told me about their decades behind the enclosure, and how they learned of people’s needs while staying isolated behind high walls. People would write down prayer requests and put them on a revolving shelf called “a turn” in the convent wall. As we spoke I felt their sweetness, and intensity. In prayer they had found their calling. In prayer they had spent their lives. When we said goodbye, they said, “God bless you.” I felt lifted up. Other people’s prayers have made me feel closer to my own. I love the recitations at Sabbath services at my congregation, the communal feeling of voices raised together in Hebrew and English and the cantor’s chant. And some prayers, in the sanctuaries of my making, like the bay at sunset, are the ones I compose. Lines of the Psalms, images of nature, meditations that flow from the moment at hand: They move through me, silent yet resonant, a contemplation of mysteries that provide me, on a pilgrimage of a simple afternoon, a sense of exaltation. “Dear God,” I begin, ”Whatever we call you / Wherever we find you / in the laughter of our children / the tenderness of our parents / the strength of our brothers and sisters and friends/the closeness of our companions and husbands and wives. / In the arc of the pelican/the leap of the mullet, / the perfect sunny day / or incoming storm / In whatever ways we understand you, / in a church or synagogue or mosque, / or on a beach beneath a starry sky, / we offer gratitude for this day.”

Read More

Pilot mocked God, until he ran out of fuel in a snowstorm

By Mark Ellis, Godreports, February 6, 2014

Raised in the secular Seventies, completely unchurched, he had no room for God until he ran out of fuel in an Alaskan storm, miles from his destination.

“I was a God mocker,” says Mark Rose, founder of Genesis Alive, and the author of Last of the Long Hunters, a story of the pilots who fly the Alaskan Arctic.

Rose learned to fly at 16, and by age 22 had become a bush pilot who helped to take care of a fleet of helicopters that worked on the Alaska pipeline. “My ego meter was on 101,” he admits.

One day he flew some hunters to the upper part of a large river on the Arctic. But on his return flight, carrying one passenger, several things went wrong. First, herds of caribou had moved in, covering his first and second choices for a landing spot. Then he began to run low on fuel, so he called ahead for a weather check at the small airport near Kotzebue, on the Baldwin Peninsula.

“Come on in, the weather’s fine,” the FAA flight service operator told him.

He decided to take the chance his fuel would hold out, but then weather conditions changed dramatically. “I ran into a snowstorm at night, and I couldn’t see the terrain, so I had to follow the gray ribbon of river below.” In the days before satellite weather imaging, the man had given him bad advice.

“All my options were evaporating as fast as I could fly.”

Rose had several friends—fellow pilots—who perished in similar flying conditions. There must be a way out, he thought. I don’t want to die at 22. I won’t get to experience marriage…

He had been flying on empty for 30 minutes. Then the engine started missing. “I was just waiting for silence and to have to crash at night.”

His mind turned to his very last option—God. Rose had never prayed before, but in desperation, he lifted up a silent prayer. If there is a God, I need your help now.

Then a voice spoke to him that was crystal clear. Son, you said the right thing. After he heard the voice, Rose also experienced the sensation of “a light bulb” that came on in his mind.

Immediately after his prayer, the plane popped out of the snowstorm. “Before me were the beautiful lights of Kotzebue—it might as well have been the lights of heaven,” he recalls.

There was only one problem—he still had to fly another 20 miles over the Kotzebue Sound, a broad expanse of salt water north of the Bering Sea.

“That was a breath-holder,” he says. When he landed safely at Kotzebue Airport, his humanist worldview collapsed. There was no earthly reason his plane should have traveled such a distance with no fuel.

Rose believes God added an hour of fuel to his tanks to save his life. “When I landed I was a different boy. I was not a Christian, but I was a believer in God.”

He thought about his grandmother, the only Christian in his family. So gramma was right; there is something out there, he thought.

Rose started to date a Christian woman who challenged him to read the Bible for the first time. As he read the pages of Scripture, something surprising happened. “I fell in love with the God of the Bible—his reasonableness, his forgiveness, his justice,” he recounts.

But his stubborn heart was still not ready to make Jesus his Savior and Lord.

Then he had another brush with death in a helicopter that crashed, which completely flattened the seat he rode in.

About the same time, he missed a flight with some of the lead contractors for the Alaskan pipeline due to a schedule conflict. Shortly after the plane took off, it crashed, killing everyone aboard.

Later, on a flight to Fairbanks on a bush aircraft, he began to reflect on his life. I’m not happy. This whole thing is not working, he admitted to himself.

Everything I read in the Bible is either a lie or its true. It’s all or nothing. From reading the Bible I understand God is my creator. If Jesus can raise someone from the dead and forgive my sins, that’s exactly what God has for me.

At that moment, Rose surrendered his life to Jesus Christ. “When I landed in Fairbanks I was a different boy, once again.”

Read More

Creation Genetics & Adam Our Ancestor | Origins with Dr. Robert Carter

Read More

The Code of Life DNA, Information, & Mutation, Part 1, Dr. Georgia Purdom

Read More