...common theme in today’s Scripture readings is waiting. In Psalm 13, David cries out over and over again, “How long, O Lord? How long must I wait for you to take away the pain in my soul? How long must I wait for you to take away the sorrow in my heart?” I suspect the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years also cried out to God, “How long, O Lord? How long must I go on suffering before you will heal me?” Waiting for God tests the soul, but it is a universal experience of the faithful. Most likely, we will wait for God to answer us many times throughout our lives. Like the woman in Mark 5, we wait for God to heal us of our infirmity and disease. Like the psalmist, we wait for God to heal our broken hearts and anguished souls. We wait for God to mend broken relationships and ignite new relationships. We wait for God to enter into our earthly situations and alter them so that we have more happiness and peace. We wait for God to rescue us from our trials and tribulations. We wait for God to save us from ourselves. You might consider: what are you waiting for God to do in your life? St. Augustine (354-430), who is arguably the most influential Christian theologian in the history of Western Christianity, writing over 400 letters, books, and sermons, and serving as a Bishop in an influential part of northern Africa during early Christiandom was waiting for God to change his heart. Before he became a great spiritual leader, when Augustine was a young man, he was a very successful...
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...bonesetter is more broken than the bones he heals. This entire story is based inside the mind of Ruth Young, daughter to LuLing Young, and granddaughter to Precious Auntie. Each character's personality unveils as they enter their past, it begins with present Ruth, then moves to Ruth’s childhood, and in the end Lulings childhood and her interaction with her mother (Precious Auntie).To the Young family healing is more than physical it is emotional. The conflict between mother to daughter fractures them like bones- shattered, broken, and painful; yet with those ruptured pieces, they heal and sculpt themselves into strong women. No matter how broken, they may be, they will always heal and come unit to become stronger than steel. The conflict happening in The Bonesetter’s Daughter...
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...Hjvjn gyygb “I’m falling apart, barely breathing with a broken heart that’s still beating,” sung by Lifehouse in “Broken”. Songs like this should not have to be written, people should not have to feel this way. Broken hearts are such a tragedy and they are the reason so many things happen; death, depression, anxiety, and all of the… If people were nice to each other, thought about others and themselves in a more positive way, meant the things they said and did the things they uttered in the silence and the sounds broken hearts would not exist. If broken hearts did not happen then none of the terrible things in life would exist. I believe that the way treat we treat people and the way we think about ourselves and others greatly impacts one's level of happiness and the way one goes through life; whether...
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...The Rental Heart – analytical essay The human heart is an organ that pumps blood throughout the body; it helps the body create oxygen so we can live. The heart is a crucial part of the human anatomy, and a part we cannot live without. Despite being so important, is the heart only the size of a large fist, but if the heart is not beating then there is no life. That is the physical description of the hart, but what about the psychological description of the heart? What does it mean when you get your heart broken for the first time? Will it never heal? Can you ever fix a broken heart? In the short story the rental heart written by Kirsty Logan, we are introduced to the problem of a broken heart, and hos the protagonist in the story deals with having his/her heart broken repeatedly throughout the story. The short story is about a guy/girl telling us about his life with heartbreak, every relationship were he/she got his/her heart broke by the person he/she was in love with. It is about how he/she deals with the pain and sadness that comes with a broken heart. Every time a relationship ends the protagonist takes the broken heart out of his/her chest, and rents a new heart he/she can replace it with. The story is not written chronologically, it is set up like a time line, we start out in present time, and afterwards we go back in time as the protagonist talks about his/her former love stories. The first person the protagonist tells us about is Grace, and she is the last person...
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...10 tips to mend a broken heart Bess Myerson once wrote that “to fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful.” Especially if you are the one who wanted the relationship to last. Mending a broken heart is never easy. There is no quick way to stop your heart from hurting so much. To stop loving isn’t an option. Author Henri Nouwen writes, “When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful.” But how do we get beyond the pain? Here are 10 tips I’ve gathered from experts and from conversations with friends on how they patched up their heart and tried, ever so gradually, to move on. 1. Go through it, not around it. I realize the most difficult task for a person with a broken heart is to stand still and feel the crack. But that is exactly what she must do. Because no shortcut is without its share of obstructions. Here’s a simple fact: You have to grieve in order to move on. During the 18 months of my severe depression, my therapist repeated almost every visit: “Go through it. Not around it.” Because if I went around some of the issues that were tearing me apart inside, then I would bump into them somewhere down the line, just like being caught in the center of a traffic circle. By going through the intense pain, I eventually surfaced as a stronger person ready to tackle problems head on. Soon the...
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...reading, I couldn't put it down until I finished it. I admired how the book was set apart from other religious books by its innocence and simplicity through the lens of a child. This book touched my heart and opened my eyes to see...
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...I was blessed though: With God’s help, my heart was strong enough to love another after two years. But while I healed, I lived a quiet, reflective life. By forgiving, Immaculée was able to live a peaceful life the way she deserved. She never seeked revenge nor wished bad things upon the murders. Instead, she lived her life with God by her side. Everyday, Immaculée prayed for those survivors who may have trouble seeking forgiveness. She shared her experiences and was an influence to those around her wanting to seek forgiveness, but had trouble doing so. A genocide survivor told Immaculée, “I thought you were crazy to forgive them, Immaculée- that you were letting them off the hook. But the pain and bitterness I’ve been carrying in my heart for 11 years is about to kill me. I’ve been miserable for so long that I don’t have the energy to live anymore. But I kept hearing people talk about how you forgave your family’s killers and moved on with your life…I need to learn how to let go of my hatred, too. I need to live again” (207). Immaculée responded with, “I told her how I put my trust in God, and related all I’d done to...
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...Zita Summary Ms. Francisco Reteche is a foreigner I bet, he went to Pauambang to teach and to heal his broken heart (just an analysis). During his class he was astonished by one of the students name.. Zita. Zita is the only daughter of Don Eliodoro, a tycoon in the place. Now I guess, logically, Zita is also the name of Mr. Reteche's lover whose identity was hidden by Mr. Rotor (The Author) And perhaps the complete essence was hidden too. What a mysterious concept about love...yet so beautiful. Zita is a short story about a girl who fell in love with her tutor. Let's just assume that this is Zita. Zita is a young girl, who's taught to act like a lady. A young lady that eventually fell in love with his teacher. In the earlier part of the story, the teacher was kind of "shocked" that the girl was named Zita, maybe because of the fact that she fell in love with another girl named Zita--- maybe the cause of his "gloominess." His teacher kept receiving letters enveloped in a blue envelope, and every time he opens it, he feels sad or he's acting strange. Maybe the letter came from his lover or a person that broke his heart. "Maybe"(just a wild guess because it wasn't mentioned in the story) she's also named as Zita. That's why he feels strange towards Zita. I think he likes Zita but he just couldn't admit it because he's trapped into a certain sentiment. Maybe that's the reason why he decided to move for awhile and stay in Zita's place as a teacher. This guy is very serious especially...
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...I’ve been infatuated with someone more times than I can count. Almost every time I thought I was so in love with that person. I was so wrong every time. I thought that those feelings had to mean something more than just a strong physical attraction, but they weren’t. A few times I got my heart broken because I was trying to make more out of it than what was there and other times I would wake up and realize that there were absolutely no feelings left. The mind and the heart are both very strong and this is where the confusion with infatuation begins. When we’re alone we’re eager to find love and sometimes this may cloud the real situation. Infatuation can be one of the most intense feelings a person can experience in their life. Many times it’s...
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...When I first learned that sex could be used as a healing tool, I thought these people are crazy. How could something that has caused me so much pain lead to my healing. It’s easy to understand why I would feel this way everything I knew of sex left me feeling shameful and made me want to jump out of my skin. Little did I know that this had nothing to do with sex itself but rather the abuse of sex and the power it holds. My story is very similar to most abuse victim so i’ll spare you all the details, but I will tell you that I was sexually abused at the age of 1 and this left me broken from pretty much the start of my life. I never had a healthy relationship with sex. To me all I knew of sex was that is was something that was demanded and...
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...forever changed. At first I could not recognize the person on the other end of the line, because of all the pain and crying in her voice, but shortly I realized the person on the other end was the mother of my best friend. Burton Thomas Brown, also known as BT, was found dead on his parent’s couch. He overdosed on what we now know to be Xanax and painkillers. His heart just stopped. The instant I heard those words come out of his mother’s mouth, I think my heart stopped as well. I felt it shatter into five million tiny pieces, build itself back up, and shatter again five million more times. “Why would God, my God, allow for such a horrific thing to happen to such a beautiful person?” is the question that kept running through my confused mind. “Why BT?” I thought to myself, “Why now?” In the days that followed, I experienced a pain I had never knew existed. In comparison to child birth, it was much, much worse. This was an internal pain. A pain that no amount of medication could ever cure. According to everyone around me, this was a pain that only time could heal, but in my eyes, I would be lucky if time could even heal any part of this. In the days that followed, I endured more headaches, heartaches, tears, and sickness than lots of people experience in a lifetime. I attended the viewing, but I wasn’t...
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...themselves into how we see and feel the world. If we are lucky, work hard and learn our lessons then, hopefully, the good outweigh the bad. We learn that the world is an exciting but also a dangerous place. Certainly most of us have had our fingers burnt at some time or another. That is, bad things have happened to us during our lives. They range from the physical scars we bear from cuts, breaks, illnesses and diseases that strike us down sometimes without warning. They are the accidents from simply falling over or from going head to head with a car. They are the psychological scars from tragedies such as bereavement or divorce. We often say that given time, we will recover. We will get better. Things will improve. Time, we say is a great healer. Time itself though if we think about it, is indifferent to our various crises and celebrations. Time, we seem to have universally agreed is a unit measuring the distance between two events. The hours, weeks, months and years themselves do not do anything. It is how we fill our time that makes it productive, or wastes it. Different people in the same period of time will do very different things. One might write a masterpiece, another might embroider a quilt. One might do nothing but watch TV. The same amount of time has passed but with very different results. It is up to us to give the time value and meaning. When we suffer an injury, we know that as humans, we will repair to a certain extent over a period of time. A bone that is broken will set...
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...believe not just because it is not how our parents were taught and how we were taught about how marriage is supposed to me. Including also most people these days tend to date the same sex just because there previous relationships didn’t turn out right like how they wanted it to, either they were cheated on a lot and left with broken hearts or just they believed they was not attractive enough due to self-esteem issues. So, people tend to turn gay because of this, they believe that they will find a more faithful relationship and believe its love when there just trying to heal a broken heart they have. Also in this day of age our kids are continuously being exposed to many bad influences while growing up. So, why do we need to have our kids witnessing this? That it is okay to date and marry the same sex when in the bible it’s a sin. It says in Leviticus 18:22 that ‘You shall not lie with a male as with a women, it is and abomination.” It also says in verse 24 and 25 Leviticus that “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean.” “And the land became unclean so that I punished its iniquity, and the land.” Just in these few lines in the bible tells us that loving the same gender is a crime and will be punished for committing this sin. Now, yes we commit sins daily like lie, steal, curse and etc. Even though this is a small crime we commit we do over time. We learn how to stop doing these bad...
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...Kingdom Essay Taylor Downey Grand Canyon University: BIB 354 1/29/2015 Kingdom Essay Within scripture and the gospels, Jesus was an incredible teacher and preached the good news of the kingdom of God to those around Him in his ministry. In the Gospels, he is called teacher more than 40 times, which proves that he was truly an influential figure and people hung to every word he spoke. Within his words and teachings, he talks about a variety of topics such as love, forgiveness, and purity. However, the big picture for Jesus as a teacher was speaking truth and pointing people towards the coming of the Kingdom of God. The majority of what he spoke on centered on this idea of kingdom, which showed the many characteristics of the Kingdom. How Jesus Taught The material to which Jesus taught was very impactful, but they way he delivered it and taught was truly unlike any other. Jesus was know for using parables within his lessons because of the audience he dealt with and the resistance he might face. The best way to fight the resistance was to teach in a way that broke through potential hostility within listeners while teaching on dangerous topics (Stein, 1996). The beautiful thing about the way that Jesus taught was before his listeners could resist what he was saying, he already got his point across and it was received because of the parables in which he used. An example of this would be in Luke chapter 13 verse 18 and 19 when he uses the phrase “like a mustard seed” and uses...
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...Father Greg Boyle writes in his book, Tattoos on the Heart, that he indexed the word “sinner” in Scripture scholar Marcus Borg’s work and it said “see outcast.” His conclusion: “This was a social grouping of people who felt wholly unacceptable. The world had deemed them disgraceful and shameful, and this toxic shame, as I have mentioned before, was brought inside and given a home in the outcast” (Boyle 70). Father Greg “G” Boyle’s idea of shame is a pertinent idea throughout his book. Therefore, the means by which shame is cleansed from a person becomes pertinent as well. “G” prescribes large and continuous doses of the compassion that was withheld when the shame had crept into their souls. The life lesson that compassion heals shame is seen through father Greg Boyle's actions with the homies, the other people’s interactions with the...
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