OVERCOMING TRAGEDIES AND SEEING JOY

Maybe you, as I, have faced a childhood of difficulties and that has hurt your walk with the Lord. Your scars have made you wary of opening up and showing true feelings for God, since many authority figures of your tender years were often cruel and even unjust. I can tell you truly that I have been able to see God's grace in letting me open up and express and profound joy for the Lord and make myself available to His love. I recall the writer CS Lewis and his need to overcome a tragic childhood as well. When he did, he found true joy.

At one time a hardened atheist, writer C.S. Lewis learned of a benevolent and loving God who cared about him. Lewis was able to overcome his terrible childhood memories and come to Jesus. he said, "In the Trinity (third term of school) Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed . . . . The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."
Then Lewis made a specific step to accept Jesus as the God/man, the Savior. "I was now approaching the source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood. . . . No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy. If anything, it was the reverse. I had hoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can best symbolize it as a place; instead, I found it to be a Person."

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In school's Bible Apologetics class we're doing a lightning round of learning the books of the Bible so that by the end of the semester, each student will having a working knowledge of EVERY book of the Bible - all 66 in a condensed form so they will know where to go when someone asks them a question about the Scripture.

I am currently working on having a Christmas devotional book being published. The working title is "Fireside Psalms" and it will be the modified version of my doctorial dissertation. I will let you know when it is available - right now the expected time of release is the week before Thanksgiving. it will be a daily devotional that you read from Thankgiving Day right up to Christmas. Each day you will read a passage in the Psalms that reveals something new about God's personal relationship with you. Plenty of Hebrew words to enjoy in their definitions and etymology.