Saw this over at Jared's blog:

Please continue to pray for Michael Spencer. If you are able, I know he and his wife would appreciate your donation (click on the PayPal Donate link at his site). He has lost his job now, having exceeded approved FMLA leave, and it's not like he was bankin' anyway. His medical bills will be killer.

Michael (the iMonk) has cancer. here's an update on his site.

Update: As many of you know, David Wayne is also suffering. As is Matt Chandler (H/T again, Jared). Prayers appreciated.

This MLK day please take some time to pray for LIFE!



Prayer makes a difference.

Major Earthquake Hits Haiti

An olive branch. And a cry for help?



In the top 5 best hard rock bands ever? Discuss. :-)

Please pray for Matt Chandler, Pastor of the Village Church outside Dallas, and for his wife and kids and church. After suffering a seizure and falling last week, he was rushed to the hospital where an MRI disclosed a mass in his frontal lobe. He is undergoing surgery to remove the tumor on Friday. The neurosurgeons are not sure of its malignancy but will perform a biopsy.

Matt's preaching and ministry have impacted thousands and thousands, including me.

His statements reveal his rock solid faith in the sovereign goodness of God and a peace that passes understanding.

Let's pray this is all some huge mistake. Or that God heals him.

He's having surgery this morning. From his blog:

I saw the surgeon yesterday and the news wasn't good. My CT scan revealed not only a large tumor on the colon but a tumor on my liver and 2 nodules on my lungs. Needless to say this was a pretty big blow.

The treatment plan as of now is this. I have surgery scheduled for tomorrow - December 24th at 11:00am at Harbor Hospital in Baltimore. After that I am to immediately begin receiving chemotherapy.

Update: Here is an update from David's daughter Jollette.

The Reformissionary has posted his family's 2008 Christmas picture. I think this is a hoot, and heartwarming too, considering the serious health issues the family has been dealing with this year (his wife Molly is suffering from a neurological disease called Chiari I Malformation). This is a neat picture of joy and perseverance in trials.



Their 2007 picture is also awesome.

Please pray for the McCoys this Christmas.

Aka, the Jollyblogger. He has colon cancer.

Saturday morning I told my girls that I would take them to see Bolt at the theater that afternoon.
They played sweetly together most of the morning, but midway through the day they just kept getting on each other's nerves, and after several warnings to stop didn't prevent them from aggravating each other, I finally employed the nuclear option. "Never mind on the movie," I said and explained why.

An hour or so later, I was giving them a bath in preparation for errands. I had decided that I would spring the movie on them as a surprise and use my changed mind as a way to explain grace to them (which Becky and I do a lot).

During the bath, Grace said, "I've gotta get my neck clean because I can't take dirt on my neck into the movie theater."

"Why do you think you're going to a movie?" I asked. "I told you we weren't."

She looked at me unfazed and said, "Yeah, but I prayed to God and said I'd be sweet and I know he'll give me a second chance."

Turns out after I left the room after taking the movie plan away, both girls decided to pray to God to apologize for not being sweet and to ask for another chance.

Isn't it awesome that we worship the God of second (and third and fourth and fifth . . .) chances?

It was also weird and fun to have been the unwitting answer to my daughters' prayer!

(We're still working on the concept of being sweet not to avoid consequences or to have consequences rescinded but because it's the right thing to do. :-)

I don't know if you've ever read much P.J. O'Rourke, but he's one of my favorite humorists and writers. His is an interesting story of a hard-drinking, cutting edge journalist and satirist with a leftist hippy past who is now, of all things, a Republican.

Well, P.J. has cancer. Please pray for him. Thankfully, it's of a kind that is usually curable, and he has even written a very funny article about it. A snippet (note: contains some slightly off-color language):

I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy's. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass ... well, I'll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?

Which brings me to the nature of my prayers. They are, like most prayers from most people, abject self-pleadings. However, I can't be the only person who feels like a jerk saying, "Please cure me, God. I'm underinsured. I have three little children. And I have three dogs, two of which will miss me. And my wife will cry and mourn and be inconsolable and have to get a job. P.S. Our mortgage is subprime."

God knows this stuff. He's God. He's all-knowing. What am I telling him, really? "Gosh, you sure are a good God. Good -- you own it. Plus you're infinitely wise, infinitely merciful, but ... look, everybody makes mistakes. A little cancer of the behind, it's not a big mistake. Not something that's going on your personal record. There's no reason it can't be, well ... reversed, is there?"

No doubt death is one of those mysterious ways in which God famously works. Except, on consideration, death isn't mysterious. Do we really want everyone to be around forever? I'm thinking about my own family, specifically a certain stepfather I had as a kid. Sayonara, you s.o.b.

Napoleon was doubtless a great man in his time -- at least the French think so. But do we want even Napoleon extant in perpetuity? Do we want him always escaping from island exiles, raising fanatically loyal troops of soldiers, invading Russia and burning Moscow?

Well, at the moment, considering Putin et al, maybe we do want that. But, century after century, it would get old. And what with Genghis Khan coming from the other direction all the time and Alexander the Great clashing with a Persia that is developing nuclear weapons and Roman legions destabilizing already precarious Israeli-Palestinian relations -- things would be a mess.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Here's the Situation:

My mom has a friend in the UK who recently came to Christ. She has NO Christian community and is hungry for it. All the churches in her area are old beautiful buildings with dead congregations.

Is there some sort of directory of Bible-believing evangelical fellowships?

Is there a person or ministry over there that she can contact?

I know that they have had some dynamite Bible conferences over there before, is there a website that lists such things?

Do you have any suggestions so I can try and get this lady in touch with a genuine Bible-teaching, spiritually-growing Christian community?

Please pray for long-time Thinklings friend Songstress.

Saw this post on Francis Chan's video blog yesterday and it really challenged me.



I don't know if I'm totally sold on the logic as a mandate (Chan himself does not save for emergencies or retirement), but I am totally sold on the spirit behind it.

I'm dying inside, it feels like. Despair over a situation, over a slow-motion heartbreak, is taking over right now and I'm having trouble hanging on to hope.

Your prayers would be wonderful.

In a short while I'll feel better, and I'll post normal stuff and it will be like nothing is wrong. Who knows, I might even delete this post.

But I could sure use prayer right now.

Thanks.

Fox News Nashville reports:

According to state troopers one of [Steven Curtis] Chapman's teenage sons was pulling into their Williamson county home tonight when he hit his five year old sister.

The little girl was pronounced dead at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital.

Update:
The Tennessean has more.

From Michelle Malkin

Put aside your political differences and join me in keeping Sen. Ted Kennedy and his family in your prayers as they grapple with the news of his malignant brain tumor diagnosis.

Someone recently asked me, "If God isn’t going to answer all of my prayers, does that mean that some of my prayers are wasted?"

It’s a legitimate question. Especially in light of James 4:3:

“When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”

The Bible makes it clear that when we pray, that we should pray for God’s will. But at the same time, we are commanded to pray for everything. “Do not be anxious about anything but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6). “Everything” is a pretty broad category. This tells me that no prayer is wasted. God wants us to ask for everything. Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7). Prayer does make a difference.

Jesus said,

"Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.' Then the one inside answers, 'Don't bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed…’ yet because of the man's boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs. So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:5-13).

Although we don’t always get what we want, we are promised to get what we need. Of course, the Christian also has something else. We have the real hope of the resurrection. Jesus actually died, and actually rose again and promises that we will too, and not just in a spiritual sense. Even if we “lose” in this life, we win in Christ. “Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?” (I Corinthians 15:55).

When we cry out to Jesus as believers, God hears us as his children, and the Holy Spirit presents those prayers on our behalf, submitting them to God’s will. (Romans 8:26-27). Jesus himself earnestly prayed, “Take this cup from me.” Was that wasting his prayer, since it was God’s will that he die on the cross? I don’t think so. Part of relationship is honest communication. Prayer changes things. Perhaps most importantly, it changes us.

Please pray for my family, especially for my mother. My grandmother passed away last night.
Thanks.

Please say a prayer for my family this weekend, if you would. We really need it.

Thanks so much.

The following is from chapter 15 of Philip Yancey's Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference?. I read this last night and wanted to share it with you. I apologize for the length of the quote.

I know a woman who did not pray for more than a year, benumbed by the fear that she must have committed the unpardonable sin. Thomas Green, a wise spiritual director, dispels that fear. We judge as immature, he says, a friend who pulls away wounded but refuses to reveal what we might have done to hurt him or her. Surely the God of love as revealed in Jesus does not act in such a childish way. Green recommends the following prayer:

Lord, you care for me more than I care for myself. I cannot believe that you are playing guessing games with me. If the dryness I experience is due to some failing of mine, you make it clear to me and I will try to remedy it. But I will not entertain vague doubts; unless and until you make my failing clear to me, I will assume that is not the reason for the dryness

I take some comfort in the fact that virtually all the masters of spirituality recount a dark night of the soul. Sometimes it passes quickly and sometimes it persists for months, even years. I have yet to find a single witness, though, who does not tell of going through a dry period. Teresa of Avila spent twenty years in a nearly prayerless state before breaking through to emerge as a master of prayer. William Cowper had prayer times in which he thought he would die from excess of joy; but later he described himself as "banished to a remoteness from God's presence, in comparison with which the distance from the East to the West is vicinity."

. . .

Religious radio and television, as well as certain books and magazines, say little of God's silence. By their accounts God seems to speak volubly, commanding this minister to build a new sanctuary and that housewife to launch a new Web-based company. God represents success, good feelings, a sense of peace, a warm glow. To an audience regaled by such inspiring stories, an encounter with the silence of God hits like a shocking exception, and stirs up feelings of inadequacy.

The exception, in fact, is the cheery optimism of modern consumer-oriented faith. For centuries Christians learned what to expect on the spiritual journey from the bumbling pilgrim in Pilgrim's Progress, from John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul, from Thomas a Kempis's challenging Imitation of Christ.

. . .

If I suffer a time of spiritual aridity, of darkness and blankness, should I stop praying until new life enters my prayer? Every one of the spiritual masters insists, No. If I stop praying, how will I know when prayer does become alive again? And, as many Christians have discovered, the habit of not praying is far more difficult to break than the habit of praying.