Recent Blog Entries

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  Do You Hear Him?

  Do you hear Him?

   

  Did you know it’s possible to miss God’s voice?  Often we get so busy with life that we may not recognize the voice of God. It’s not a bad thing to have a full schedule. Maybe we spend much of our time supporting our families or serving others.  When we become too caught up in our routines, however, and no longer actively seek to hear God speak, we risk missing it when He does.

   

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  Hope that Lasts

  New Year’s Hope

   

  It’s a new year and with every new year comes a sense of expectation. Many of you enter this year with a sense of hope, or at least with some wishful thinking, that perhaps this will be the year. The year you get into shape, find that elusive relationship you’ve been searching for, or get that job you will actually enjoy. This year you will eat better, spend more time with loved ones, maybe read more books. Whatever your personal aspiration, many of us follow a new year’s tradition of making resolutions as a way to cement our often abstract hopes for change. These resolutions are meant to confirm our commitment to making a change for the better in the year to come. Anyone of us who have actually gone through the process of defining a new year’s resolution, though, knows it is pretty unlikely that those goals will actually be realized. In fact, going into 2023 it is thought that only about 38% of people will make resolutions. Of that 38%, only 9% will be successful in keeping them. About 25% of people will quit within a week, and 65% within a month. Humorously, over 40% of people who make resolutions do so expecting to quit within two months. 

   

  Whether you find these statistics amusing or just sad, they point to the reality of the human condition. We are marked by a consistent pattern of trying, but failing. We get spurts of hope inspired by things as arbitrary as a new calendar, decide it’s time to get our lives together and become the people we have always wanted to be, try to wrestle ourselves and everything else in our lives into submission, and then inevitably become exhausted and give up when the it becomes clear we can’t create or sustain the kind of change we wanted. After we have gone through this a few times, many of us just give up. We accept that things are just the way they are, and decide there is nothing we can really do about it, so we stop trying and we stop hoping.

   

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  Virtual Groups, A Very Real Option

  Many have asked about Living Free’s online groups and often the questions are the same, is this really a group? Are group members really connecting? Are most group members consistent in meeting together on Zoom?

  It was easy to be skeptical until we had no choice. Because of COVID, we started offering online groups to meet the need during the pandemic. Would people be just going through the motions on a screen, with no real connection? 

  Kristina, a facilitator of the online Understanding Depression group had this to say; “You know I’m not a fan of Zoom, and it does present a couple of challenges but I’m a fan of embracing the challenges and difficulties and making the best of them! It required a little extra work, but that’s ok.” Kristina provided additional visuals with YouTube, sent encouraging worship songs via e-mail, and offered diagrams to help the group.

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