Tag Archive for: prayer

ODJ: paul’s prayer
What personal prayers for yourself have you lifted up lately? Did you ask God for provision of needs, delivery from temptation or forgiveness of sin?

ODB: Praying Friends
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I met my friend Angie for lunch after having not seen her for several months. At the end of our time together, she pulled out a piece of paper with notes from our previous get-together. It was a list of my prayer requests she had been praying for since then. She went through each one and asked if God had answered yet or if there were any updates. And then we talked about her prayer requests. How e

ODJ: devoured
I’m sure you’ve heard your share of extreme weight loss plans. But ingesting a parasite? A newspaper has reported that some people in Hong Kong have resorted to using parasitic worms to peel off the pounds. The worms allow people to keep eating what they want and still shed weight. But the giant intestinal roundworms, which can grow up to 15 inches in length, lay up to 200,000 eggs a day. They

ODJ: money or mobility?
I hardly ever encounter beggars on the streets. But in some countries you can find them begging at the markets and shopping centres. Once, when visiting a neighbouring country, my hosts told me that for my own sake I had to ignore the beggars. If I showed the slightest interest in one, he would pursue and pester me until I gave him some money. And the moment I gave to one I would be very quickly

ODJ: the world and I
I didn’t realise how far I was removed from reality until I read The Hunger Games. It jolted me into doing some research. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates for 2010, there are about 925 million hungry people in the world. That means 13.6 percent of the world population, or almost 1 in 7 people regularly experience hunger.
With so many modern comforts w

ODJ: suffering with God
Pain. We take pills to ease it, hold prayer meetings to heal it, develop strategies to avoid it and think up philosophies to explain it. We rarely, however, consider suffering as part of God’s plan for our lives.
Classic spiritual authors take a different approach to suffering. Take the 17th century monk Brother Lawrence, for example. Lame in one leg and acquainted with illness, in The Practi

ODJ: pray for them
In his book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer states: “A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother

ODB: Crying Out To God
After all these years, I still don’t fully understand prayer. It’s something of a mystery to me. But one thing I know: When we’re in desperate need, prayer springs naturally from our lips and from the deepest level of our hearts.When we’re frightened out of our wits, when we’re pushed beyond our limits, when we’re pulled out of our comfort zones, when our well-being is challenged and e

ODJ: back from the dead
The young couple grieved over their baby. The medical staff pronounced the baby stillborn and hurried the body away. The mother, drugged from the delivery, hadn’t even been able to kiss her baby girl goodbye. Twelve hours later Analia Bouter and her husband, Favian, went to the morgue to see their child and to say farewell. When the staff pulled out the drawer holding the body, they heard a baby
