This week I received another email from pastor and professor (and missionary and hero of the faith!) Ajith Fernando and I was (yet again!) reminded of the goodness and the glory of God … and thus drawn to worship Him more rightly. Since so much of peacemaking involves suffering … (check out my “Search Past Blog Entries” on Suffering and you’ll see that I’ve posted on this topic a LOT), I thought it might be a particular encouragement to you all. Hope so. Sending you my love, Tara Barthel PS If you don’t yet know Dr. Fernando and his ministry and books, I urge you to get to know him.…

From Jonathan Edwards: “It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent [=radiant], that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all. . . Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had…

Before I moved from Chicago to Montana, I began an “email friendship” with a gifted Christian conciliator in the Midwest. (We were both in the Peacemaker Ministries Conciliator Training Program at the time and we were sharing notes / encouragement / etc.) Recently, this “spiritual father” emailed me this message and I thought it might bless you too. So (with his permission and changing identifying information to protect the stories of life that belong to others), here it is. (Oh, and … Who me? Struggle with bitterness? Can you imagine why he would think this would be an appropriate encouragement and message for little ol’ ME? hah hah) Dear Tara,…

Last night I heard one of the most God-centered, beautiful, biblical, deep, NOT “felt-needs / name it and claim it / I love God because He blesses me” testimonies. It was incredible. It was amazing. I wept and wept and was moved to worship God and was encouraged in my faith and … well … it was just lovely. (Lovely is not quite the word, but I’m not really coming up with the right one. It was good–good in all its goodness, its God-ness. It was right. It was a foretaste of Heaven. It brought us all to the Cross and turned our eyes off of ourselves and the speaker…

Thanks for all of the prayers and encouraging emails concerning my dad. He continues to remain in a medically-induced coma, but occasionally they bring him to consciousness for a few moments. When they do so, the nurses say he is a “bear” … angry, trying to yank the tube out, etc. The nurses say this is actually a good thing because it means that he wants us to know he is “still in there” and he is “fighting.” I’m still wondering about trying to go and see him … I keep thinking about whether he might actually be open to hearing the gospel now. That maybe, with death facing him…

From the end of the Ravi Zacharias International Ministries devotional email this morning … Corrie Ten Boom (a woman who was no stranger to suffering) writes, “God has plans—not problems—for our lives.” Amen! Amen!   (To subscribe to this devotional, send an empty email to: slice-html-subscribe@lists.rzim.org. I don’t have time to read anything extra! But this I read every day M-F. So good! Thank you, Dr. Zacharias! 🙂 )  

When I have the privilege of teaching on biblical peacemaking, I always have the concurrent privilege of visiting and praying with people who are suffering. Conflict & suffering go hand in hand — and I spend my breaks, meal times, and late nights seeking the Lord with hurting Believers. Last night I was struck again by how varied our responses to conflict and suffering can be. I was spending time with some friends and we were discussing our pastor’s sermon from last Sunday. (He is currently preaching on Habakkuk — so as you might imagine, we are deep into the topic of suffering.) As we began the conversation, I was…

Our family loves, prays for, and supports a Youth for Christ missionary by the name of Ajith Fernando. To us, Ajith and his family members are heroes of the faith. Their sacrifice and service would be impossible to measure outside of eternity. I love his writings and it is a joy to serve him even in some small way. Today, his letter to his supporters included an essay on pain, anger, and grace. In it, he wrote: “Grace must soften our hearts so that more grace can enter in, making us gracious and taking away that destructive attitude of anger that looks at life saying, ‘I have been wronged.’ Such…

I woke up yesterday with a heavy heart because my dear friend was scheduled for a radical mastectomy that morning. I thought of her all day long and prayed for her. And finally, in the evening, I got to speak with her. Do you know what she said to me? A single woman, godly, beautiful—found out ten days ago she has breast cancer, now in the midst of surgery and scheduling chemo and radiation—what did she say to me? ‘It was such a good day, Tara.’ And then she proceeded to retell all of God’s blessings throughout the day.   I woke up this morning with greater faith in the…