If you go to a church over the Christmas season you may be surprised by how few teenagers are there at their own free will.
Before you fire the youth pastor, parents may want to look into their own lives to understand the lack of faith engagement of their children.

A lot of research agrees that our youth faithfully mirror the aspirations, passions, lifestyles, practices, and problems of the adult world into which they are being socialized.
In these ways, our teens may actually serve as a very accurate barometer of the conditions of the culture and institutions of our larger society.
Christian Smith

And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.
You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house,
when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.
You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Duet 6:6-9

Source: Hubblesite.org

This incredible image was taken by the Hubble telescope.

It is called the Majestic Sombrero galaxy…

This galaxy is 50,000 lights years across and is approximately 28 million light years from our earth.

WOW!

God created this for our enjoyment… for us to study… but I think most of all so we would would know without question what an amazing God we have the opportunity to be in a personal relationship with .

If He has the power and creativity to create this with a single word how much more can He speak into our life and create beauty and greatness?

Psalm 33:6     The LORD merely spoke, and the heavens were created.
He breathed the word, and all the stars were born.

I love to scan the covers of the magazines as I wait at our grocery store checkout.

Most of these magazines shamelessly appeal to our human base drive for sex, power and outward beauty.

The magazine covers fixate on beauty of face and form as though that’s all there is. Joan Rivers has spent a fortune on her face but after multiple surgeries to hold onto beauty she now has a “plastic, clownish” young face on a senior citizens body. I don’t think it is the look she was going for.

Physical beauty all too quickly fades away; all one’s efforts to keep it are doomed to fail. But there is an inner beauty—authentic beauty that will endure forever—in the one “who fears the Lord”

“Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing” Proverbs 31.

This gives great insight to Matthew 13:44.

You have found a treasure: the treasure of God’s love. You know where it is but you are not ready to own it fully.

So many attachments keep pulling you away.

If you would fully own your treasure, you must hide it in the field where you found it, go off happily to sell everything you own, and then come back and buy the field.

Finding the treasure is only the beginning of the search.

Finding the treasure without being ready yet to fully own it will make you restless. (This is where most of us live)

This restless search for God is the way to holiness.

It is the journey to the place where you can rest.
Henri Nouwen

Our desire for God is the desire that should guide all other desires!

Have a Great Day!

Ed

“Dear God,
I am so afraid to open my clenched fists!
Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?
Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?
Please help me to gradually open my hands
and to discover that I am not what I own,
but what you want to give me.
And what you want to give me is love,
unconditional, everlasting love.
Amen.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen,

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest” .
Matt 11:28

Trusting God is a hard place to be but ask yourself if doing it your way has worked out as planned and if not what do you have to lose to try it His way?