blessings – The Faith Cafe

Posted on April 3, 2023February 20, 2023 by Lori Cartmell

New Life From Broken Eggs

There is often great beauty in simple things. Take the egg, for instance.

Even a plain white egg is pleasingly shaped, adorably sized, and a perfect blend of form and function.

Add some decoration, and you’ve got a small masterpiece.

Countries such as Ukraine have made an art out of decorating eggs as an Easter tradition.

Eggs “decorated” by God have a beauty all their own. There’s a charm to naturally speckled bird eggs that is irresistible.

You’d like to keep them intact forever, enjoying their freckled surface and gentle colours for as long as possible.

But if the eggs perpetually remained in the same state and were never broken open, you’d miss out on an even greater joy: you’d never get to see the chick emerge.

Sometimes you have to let go of something you love to receive an ever greater blessing.

This is something the disciples had to learn at the first Easter.

Posted on February 10, 2022February 4, 2022 by Lori Cartmell

Forward Guidance From God

1890s image of banker from Picryl, Library of Congress collection, Public Domain.

Central bankers can be inscrutable folk.

They issue statements regarding the economy that can sometimes be a bit enigmatic and vague.

Economists and journalists pore over every word of each press release, trying to read between the lines and guess at what the central banker is thinking and planning.

At other times, however, central bankers are more forthright.

They issue what is known as “forward guidance”: clearcut statements about the likely course of future monetary policy.

They may plainly state that at their next scheduled meeting, interest rates will be going up (or down). People are able to make decisions about mortgages or loans based on that foreknowledge.

Don’t you wish that God offered “forward guidance”?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if God let you know in advance what’s coming down the pike in your life?

Posted on December 25, 2021December 9, 2021 by Lori Cartmell · 3 Comments

Merry Christmas From The Faith Cafe!

Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

Merry Christmas to all my visitors and followers!

The Faith Cafe will be taking a short break over the holidays, but I’ll look forward to seeing you again in the New Year.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this quotation:

“God grant you the light in Christmas, which is faith;
the warmth of Christmas, which is love;
the radiance of Christmas, which is purity;
the righteousness of Christmas, which is justice;
the belief in Christmas, which is truth;
the all of Christmas, which is Christ.” (by Wilda English)

Remember, the best Christmas gift is to realize how much you already have!

Wishing you and your family peace, love, goodwill, and all the other blessings of Christmas, plus a happy and healthy 2022!

Lori

“For unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is given:
and the government shall be upon his shoulder:
and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God,
The Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”
Isaiah 9:6

Posted on November 22, 2021November 21, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

The Blessings of Not Seeing

Ishihara test for colour blindness. Those with normal colour vision should see a green W on a red background. Image by Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The colour blind have to take a lot by faith.

The term “colour blind” means just what it says: unable to perceive certain colours. The most common type of this vision disorder is red-green colour blindness. People with this visual deficiency may see these colours as yellowish or greyish.

While these individuals have never seen red or green, they do acknowledge that these colours exist.

Why?

Because they trust in the conviction of others who have seen red and green. They believe that those who have had real-life experience of these colours are telling the truth. So the colour blind take our word for it that these hues genuinely exist.

Basically, they believe in the existence of red and green by sheer faith.

As believers in Christ, there are fundamental things that we have to take by faith, too.

And the Bible says we will be blessed for what we haven’t seen.

Posted on August 9, 2021August 2, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

Love In Disguise

Image of elephant by laurent marx from Pixabay

Have you ever been shocked to find out that things which look nothing alike are actually closely related?

I know two men who are brothers, but who don’t resemble one another at all. One takes after his father with his dark, curly hair; the other has his mother’s straight blond hair. You would never take them for siblings by just looking at them.

It’s the same in the natural world, too. There are some plants which surprisingly belong to the same family, despite looking totally different. Broccoli and cabbages, for instance, which are both Brassicas. It’s hard to believe from their appearance that they have common roots, so to speak.

This disparity is even more evident in the animal world.

Surprisingly, jellyfish and corals are related, even though one swims like a fish and the other is fixed in place like a plant. They’re both members of the Cnidarian family.

Horseshoe crabs are actually more closely related to spiders than to other crabs, despite there seeming to be no family resemblance at all.

Image of manatee by PublicDomainImages from Pixabay

Elephants and manatees are kin, even though one lives on land and the other underwater.

I think the love of God follows this same pattern at times.

Sometimes His love looks nothing like what we would expect, so we don’t recognize certain circumstances as reflecting God working in our lives for our good.

Posted on June 24, 2021June 14, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

The Comparison Trap

Around this time of year, an unwanted visitor makes its way into many a gardener’s life.

I’m not talking about weeds or pests, although we certainly have to contend with those.

Rather, I’m referring to garden envy.

It starts out when we’re visiting the gardens of friends or neighbours. At first, we admire their lush plantings and attractive landscaping.

If we’re not careful, however, this appreciation can morph into envy. We think, I wish I had roses as beautiful as hers. Or, if only I had room in my yard for a gazebo like he does.

This envy can then develop into disenchantment with what we have. Why am I stuck with so much shade in my yard? Why can’t we afford an inground pool?

We can even become resentful of our comparatively meagre gardens, when we should be grateful to have a garden at all: many people don’t.

Envy is something we need to nip in the bud, whether it relates to our gardens or our lives.

We get into trouble when we start comparing ourselves to others. This is true even in spiritual matters.

Posted on June 3, 2021May 14, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

The Dark Side of the Moon

Is the “dark side” of the moon truly as dark as we think it is?

From Earth, we only see one side of our companion satellite. The moon is “tidally locked” with our planet, with the result that it always presents the same face to us.

Because we can’t see the side of the moon facing away from the Earth, we sometimes assume that it’s in perpetual darkness.

But this isn’t so. The “dark side” of the moon (which should more accurately be called the “far side”) gets just as much sunlight as the face we see. All sides of the moon receive the sun’s light equally in turn.

From the sun’s perspective, the moon doesn’t have a dark side at all.

It’s our perspective that throws us off and leads us to the wrong conclusion.

We can easily fall prey to misconceptions about our own lives, too. When we don’t have the right perspective, we can assume that things are darker than they really are.

Naomi in the Old Testament Book of Ruth certainly made this mistake.

Posted on April 19, 2021April 1, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

An Avalanche of Blessings

Avalanches are mysterious things.

The snow on the mountains appears static and unchanging. From day to day, nothing looks different. It seems like the status quo will continue as before.

But then all of a sudden, a mass of snow and ice breaks loose and barrels down the hills. Sweeping change happens in a flash, seemingly coming out of the blue.

There was no hint that this would happen.

Or was there?

Underneath the surface, things were going on that we couldn’t see. Perhaps the composition of the snowpack was changing, the load was becoming too great, or sublayers were weakening through melting. From above, we might not be able to tell that the snowpack was becoming increasingly unstable.

But it was now being held in such precarious tension that at any moment a tipping point would be reached. It would be enough to set the whole thing off, leading to a massive snow slide.

Do you ever feel that you’re in a period in your life where nothing seems to be happening? Despite your prayers for change, everything looks the same from day to day.

Looks can be deceiving.

When Jesus is in the picture, sudden change may be on its way, perhaps even an avalanche of blessings.

Posted on November 2, 2020October 10, 2020 by Lori Cartmell

The Gift You Didn’t Expect

Did you ever receive a gift that wasn’t quite what you were expecting?

Maybe you’d dropped hints to your husband that you wanted a certain designer perfume for Christmas, and instead you received…a power drill (coincidentally, exactly the one he wanted for his workshop!).

Or you were certain that your brother was going to give you a gift certificate to a spa so you could be pampered on your birthday, but somehow all you got from him was a new ironing board.

Let’s hope no one visiting this blog received the most tone-deaf Valentine’s Day gift I’ve heard of: a pre-planned funeral arrangement!

Our Father in Heaven knows how to give good gifts to His children, but He doesn’t always answer our requests in exactly the way we expected.

Posted on September 17, 2020September 15, 2020 by Lori Cartmell

The God of More Than Enough

In recipes, a teaspoonful of an ingredient doesn’t always mean a level teaspoon.

It can be “heaping,” meaning generous enough to form a heap on top, or “scant,” which means barely coming up to the rim of the spoon.

Likewise, a recipe might call for you to press down the brown sugar in a measuring cup so that it’s “packed.” Or it might instruct you to use only a “pinch” of a spice.

But the measures God uses are always generous. The blessings and grace He bestows on us are never meagre or paltry, but plentiful and abundant.