The God-life then is about giving your heart to God:

• Your broken heart.
• Your disbelieving heart.
• Your divided, angry, fearful heart.
• Your hard heart.

You do not, of course, have the power to transform your own heart, but you do have the power to offer it, no matter what condition it is in, to the God who is able to make all things new.

by Eyleen Farmer
from “Called to Question”

We are created for both work and leisure.

Work stimulates our mind, engages our body, energizes our creativity, and helps us make an impact on the world in which we live.

Work is a gift for the soul. Without work our soul is listless and stumbles about the cobblestones of life, uncertain and empty.

But leisure is as important to our human existence as work.

Work without leisure steals our joy and strips us of our desire to create.

Leisure is the necessary counterpart to work. It wakes us up again to the movement of life. New images poke cheerily into our soul and in those new creations we are re- created.

There's no need to postpone enjoying the gift of leisure until you can travel to white sandy beaches studded with coconut palms. ...

by Renée Miller
from "Balancing Work and Leisure"

We've seen parents forgive the very people who took the lives of their children, survivors forgive murderous terrorists, rape victims forgive their attackers. High-profile victims like missionary Gracia Burnham openly and genuinely forgive militant abductors and cold-blooded killers.

But Christians on opposite sides of a supercharged issue like abortion or homosexuality for some reason find it difficult to forgive one another.

I don't just mean an individual, one-time expression of forgiveness. I suspect that if two individual Christians on opposite sides of the abortion debate, for example, felt the need to ask each other's forgiveness, each one would eventually extend it.

What is sorely needed, though, is for all of us to cultivate a lifestyle of forgiveness toward entire groups of people--not compromising on our convictions, not backing down on what we believe to be right, but living in an attitude of ongoing forgiveness toward each other.

But how do we cultivate that, especially if we feel passionately about an injustice or sin or any one of a host of theologically and socially controversial issues?

Before we even get to the place where we can start to figure that out, however, there's a more important question we each need to answer for ourselves: Why should we live in a state of ongoing forgiveness?

The obvious answer is that it's one of the most basic of Christ's commands and a hallmark of our faith. ...

A less obvious answer to the question of why is what it does to us when we live with unforgiveness toward others. ...

by Marcia Ford
from "Cultivating a Lifestyle of Forgiveness"

More on forgiveness