How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. ~Anne Frank

These are great ideas from the Do Something! campaign.

Organize a clothes exchange – get friends and people in your community to bring anything they don’t want so they can swap!

Find a shelter in your area and offer your services

Learn a language so you can understand someone else’s culture

Find your local child abuse hotline and put the number up at school

Clean up your park or playground

Volunteer at a summer day camp in your area

Get a local coffee shop to open late one night a week so kids have an alcohol free hang out (more…)

Let the Music Play

by Derek Hanisch, RTF staff writer

Once, perhaps twice a month a good friend and I get a small group together and go to either a homeless shelter or soup kitchen about an hour away. We pile into my car, cramped and hot (only severely hot air comes out of the vents) praying that Sabra (my car) will be able to make the trip without dying. Somehow Sabra survives the journey, and we go and serve.

Why do we do it? Why do we serve? Thomas Merton puts it more eloquently than I ever could:

All the good that you do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love… If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. The real hope then is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it In some way we cannot see. (more…)

My faith keeps me grounded. People always ask me how come I’m so good, and even though I try never to overwhelm people with my faith, I always think to myself, how come God is so good.

My faith also encourages me to give my best. I know that my talent is God’s gift to me, and how I use it is my gift to him.  Sanya Richards, perhaps one of the fastest runners in the world, Olympic 2008 medalist

One day he was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said, “Master, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.” Luke 11:1

Real Quote

It is not part of the life of a natural man to pray. We hear it said that a man will suffer in his life if he does not pray; I question it. What will suffer is the life of the Son of God in him, which is nourished not by food, but by prayer. When a man is born from above, the life of the Son of God is born in him, and he can either starve that life or nourish it. Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished. Our ordinary views of prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer as a means of getting things for our selves; the Bible idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself. Oswald Chambers

I need a bible scripture or advice about jealousy and real beauty because I get jealous easily, especially about apearance. Like, I believe that other girls are more beautiful than me. That’s why I look for scriptures about what real beauty is in the eyes of Jesus Christ. I am having a hard time finding one.

Than you very much. =] Alyssa (more…)

It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials: through every cloud He brings, He wants us to unlearn something. ~ Oswald Chambers

I read this quote this morning and it stopped me. .

What does this mean? When things are tough, like when I had cancer or when my son was hurt, and things were dark, what did I need to unlearn?

Is God cruel? No. But all the things I trusted weren’t working. I wasn’t strong enough or smart enough to fix it. I didn’t have all the answers, and no one was lining up with a one-two-three formula that would make it all go away.

But I could trust God. No matter the outcome, I had something stable and beautiful and strong. It brought peace into a situation that wasn’t peaceful. It allowed me to celebrate in a time when there was nothing to celebrate. I was able to laugh, to live, and to move forward.

I remember people saying how strong I was in those times, and yet I knew that I was as weak as I had ever been. It wasn’t me. It was my faith in something greater than myself or my situation.

Perhaps what I unlearned during those hard times is my total self-sufficiency. I was strong, but my greater strength came in walking day by day, and at times minute by minute, with Christ.

Americans are willing to expend some energy in religious activities such as attending church and reading the Bible, and they are willing to throw some money in the offering basket. Because of such activities, they convince themselves that they are people of genuine faith. But when it comes time to truly establishing their priorities and making a tangible commitment to knowing and loving God, and to allowing him to change their character and lifestyle, most people stop short. We want to be ’spiritual’ and we want to have God’s favor, but we’re not sure we want him taking control of our lives and messing with the image and outcomes we’ve worked so hard to produce.” – George Barna

Don’t live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.”
~Wendy Wasserstein