John Townsend
American clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and best-selling author.
Connecting with others during difficult times makes the trials more bearable.
Faith grows when we assume the position of one who can’t do it all by himself. That means we go to God, follow Him, and ask Him for help.
Some of us have young faith, some broken faith, and some mature faith.
I have noticed in this economic downturn that more of my friends talk about God…
Hope is impossible unless we experience empathy and identification. We cannot feel hopeful that things will be OK unless someone understands what we are going through and gets it.
…faith in God creates the possibility that even if our situations do not change, life can be good.
We must exercise faith. We don’t pretend we’re fine. We don’t deny it. But we trust in Him.
I can’t keep count of the times when I have seen how hard times make people much more relationally accessible than they were before their difficulty.
Whatever our situation, we feel some sense of confusion, anxiety, and helplessness. At the same time, we think about God and wonder where He is.
Open your heart and your sad feelings to Him and the safe people He brings to you.
The message of Scripture is that God wants us to connect both with Him and also with each other.
God has made Himself knowable through the Bible.
It is easy to think that we should put up a brave front and stay positive about all our struggles. But that is not the biblical model.
What is faith? Faith is trusting God for your problems and for your life.
God wants to help us and will bear our burdens.
…the central message of the Bible is about God redeeming a humanity that is in trouble and suffering.
We want to know that life is good. Not perfect but good. Not problem free, but good. Good in some way that we did not anticipate. Good in some way that connects us to God, others, and our purposes in life.
…there is something beyond our circumstances, and that is an emotional, from-the-heart connection to God, no matter what is going on in our lives.
…the big picture of our spiritual growth is not an event but the development of the habit of relationship with God.
Where do you go when hard times hit? Most of the time, our tendency is to enter our internal cave…we naturally shut down, withdraw from it all, and try to figure things out on our own, reemerging from life when we have some sense of centeredness.