Encourage-[en-kur-ij] to inspire with courage, spirit, or confidence.
The enCourage Blog is weekly dose of encouragement in a world that is often filled with bad news. We offer life-giving entries each Monday and Thursday written by gifted women from across our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). You can subscribe below to have them delivered to your inbox. With hundreds of blog pieces, you can search on a variety of topics in the search bar above to read and share with friends. Christina Fox, a gifted author, serves as our enCourage General Editor. If you are interested in submitting a piece, you can contact her at cfox@pcanet.org.
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Engaging Culture With Wisdom and Grace
MARIA CURREY | CONTRIBUTOR “If only one more page, one more encounter, one more embrace,” your heart moans. When you find someone or something engaging, what is it that makes you want more? Maybe it is their compelling and charismatic personality? It might be a book or movie which grips your attention—when no matter how many other tasks beckon for your attention, you cannot help but turn the pages or watch it through to the credits, and you feel like a best friend moved away when it ends. The characters linger, the impression of that special person remains long after bidding farewell. In sharp contrast, we often find ourselves in a culture of criticism, cruelty, cancelling, and cut-throat competition, so, how do we take the myriad tensions and reconcile them with our Christian calling? How do we engage culture with wisdom and grace? Bury your head in the uncountable sands of Scripture and wait for Jesus to return? As comfortingly cocooned as such an action-plan may be, the losses would be countlessly grievous—both to our hearts and to a lost swath of culture needing and waiting for Jesus’ winsome love. What if you and I are the pivotal story of Jesus to be watched and read for those who are eternally lost? What if the Holy Spirit has a special assignment for the pages of your life to be the unfolding of wisdom and grace? God’s gifts perfectly crafted through your uniquely designed life. Remember the Psalm 139 promises that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made;” the images of His handiwork are the wisdom and grace of God in you! Why are wisdom and grace critical hooks in our life stories?...
A Backwards Birth Into Heaven
SUSAN TYNER | CONTRIBUTOR I watched my Daddy be born into Heaven today. We were all around him as he lay dying in his bed at home. I squeezed his hand on one side while Mama grasped the other, my sister balancing on the mattress at his head while my brother held his feet. With our spouses and his many grandchildren crowded around, we sat with him one more time in his bedroom. We were no strangers to this room—there for about fifty years we had yelled at Ole Miss football games on the TV, nursed coffee during early morning talks, climbed into the warm covers while he read his Bible in a close by chair, even played tic-tac-toe in lotion on his back. Decades of normal breathing and living. And so, it was a blessing that when he needed to die, we could be in that familiar-made-sacred space together. I never saw someone die before, and it’s amazing how the human body will struggle to stay alive. We held our breaths as we counted his. He would pause breathing and we would look at each other, is this it? only to see him gasp air again. This happened so many times that once we laughed because it got comical for such a heavy moment—or maybe we just needed to release a tension we were not used to holding for so long. The hospice staff told us he could hear us even though he couldn’t respond, and Daddy proved them right when he squeezed Mama’s hand, responding that he loved her. His clavicle strained just like my little boy’s did when he had croup. We felt his pulse slow, lagging only a little behind his breath. At some point we attempted to comfort him by reciting Psalm 23 as a group. I think we added thirty minutes to his life because we flubbed it so bad my mom had to take over like the school teacher she is. Again, we laughed. How terrible for Daddy to hear us collectively fail a basic test when he had invested his adult life teaching us the Bible. Here we had been telling him to go and not worry about us and he’s lying there thinking, WHAT? My kids can’t even remember The Lord is My Shepherd?? What kind of shape am I leaving them in? Then, although we knew he was leaving, it was weird when in one moment after midnight, he did not catch his breath. Suddenly, he was gone. And, we did not feel like laughing anymore but going to our corners of the house to be quiet and do whatever one does after watching your role model leave your world. What seemed like only moments later, the funeral home is on site, desecrating our sacred bedroom. As I fill out paperwork, the hospice nurse tells me that Daddy, who practiced medicine for the hospice company, actually had worked earlier that week for them. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He pushed and tackled cancer’s pain the way he played linebacker at Bentonia High School. Whether it was football, medicine, church, or a good Mississippi snow day, Will Thompson left it all on the field. Why would his death week be any different? I see them put Daddy’s body in a plastic bag. As a doctor, he saw death a lot and this scene would not shock him. I did not know at the time it was shocking me. I assumed my head knowledge that he was in a better place would inoculate me from shock—that the theology I had been taught would cushion the impact grief causes....
Created to Glorify God
CHRISTINE GORDON | CONTRIBUTOR Glory be to God! We say it and we mean it; we want our lives to reflect God’s glory. According to the Westminster Catechism, part of our creation design as humans is to glorify God. But what exactly does that mean? What is a Biblical definition of glory? And how do we give it to God? This word “glory” is all over the Bible, used in different eras and contexts. In the Old Testament it is the Hebrew word “kavod” meaning weight, value, honor, or respect. In the New Testament it is the Greek term “doxa,” from which we draw our word, “doxology.” The Glory of Christ John 16 and 17 are great places to settle in and investigate in order to understand “glory” in the context of Jesus and his church. In these chapters, Jesus just shared the Passover meal with his disciples and was teaching them one last time about why he had come and what was soon to happen to him. After promising the Holy Spirit would come and minister to them, he described the Spirit’s ministry in John 16:14: “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” The ministry of the Spirit is to make clear to the world the person and work of Jesus. Like a bright light shining through a dark December night onto a beautiful Christmas wreath, the Spirit highlights the beauty of Christ. The Holy Spirit takes what belongs to Jesus and show it to his followers. The Spirit displays Jesus’s power, moral excellence, love, grace, and beauty. He platforms the holiness of Christ. Jesus’s glory is all that he is and all he has done. It is his resume and his person.[1] It is the overflowing radiance, intensity, and energy of divine life and holiness.[2] All of these things are revealed to the people of God by the Holy Spirit...
The Greatest Father
KATIE POLSKI | CONTRIBUTOR I had a good dad growing up. He was a little quirky, but he was a good dad. He often brought a smile to the mundane and laughter into hardship. One day, while in the middle of cancer treatments, dad called me into his room because he had something “really important” he wanted to tell me. My stomach turned; I didn’t want to have “the talk” that I felt like was inevitable when someone was facing a dire illness. I walked into his room with my shoulders stooped and sat down next to his recliner. He leaned forward and said, “Guess what? I pulled the ‘cancer card’ for the first time. And it worked!” What my father simply could not wait to tell me was that he got out of a speeding ticket because he told the cop, in what I imagined was a dramatically strained voice, “I have cancer.” Definitely a little quirky, but he was a good dad. The Imperfect Love of Our Earthly Fathers While I had a good father, he wasn’t perfect. No one single father is. And while I imagine many share my gratitude for having a loving dad, there are many who did not experience this kind of care. There are sons and daughters who did not feel loved because of a dad who was absent. There are grown children who are working through the emotional pain from abuse. There are others who never really knew their father because work took priority over family. I have wept with these friends, reflected with them, and mourned over their scars. Father’s Day carries an array of emotions for children who grew up in all different circumstances. The temptation, no matter what the experience, is to compare our earthly father with our heavenly One. But believer in Christ, there is no comparison. Whether we celebrate good dads this Father’s Day, or mourn broken relationships, there is hope in a Father who loves perfectly and completely, and this heavenly Father calls you His child...