Friday reading

[Setz...@aol.com]

Interesting.  This is a different focus on this passage.  Not the walking on water part, but the frightened by the dark figure approaching from the unknown.  Does this mean that many of the things that loom on the horizon looking scary are really God trying to teach us something.  I will try to remember to see it that way!  I have said that I don't agree with the common statement that "things happen for a reason."  Rabbi Kucher says in "When Bad things Happen to Good People"  that bad things just happen and I do not want to believe that bad things (Amish children being raped and killed in a schoolhouse, for example.)  What I do believe is that things work out.  And now I believe that sometimes we just think bad things are getting ready to happen and that is not really what is going on.  Look for the lesson, I guess is what I learned (again) today.

 

Lynn

 

P.S.  I don't really anticipate any problem with the link from the website.

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See AOL's top rated recipes and easy ways to stay in shape for winter.

[Barbara Ladner]

I agree that God doesn't cause many of the bad things attributed to him. Often, though things that look bad don't turn out that way, as Lynn says. And God can bring good out of much of the bad stuff, even if He didn't want it to happen in the first place. I think that many of the bad things that have happened to me have helped me empathize with others in ways that an otherwise privileged upbringing might not have prepared me to do.

Barbara

[Ed Dorsey]

I have oftened seen my experience with addiction and my wife's death
in the same way as Barbara mentioned, i.e., as a means to empathize
with others in pain/need.

The consistent experience I have had in this group is to find that I
am not alone in ANY experience if life... Thanks to all for sharing.

> > ------------------------------

> > See AOL's top rated

> recipes<http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004>and

> easy
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> shape<http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aoltop00030000000003>for
> winter.
> >
> > >
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>
>
> --
> Peace,
> Barbara
>
> >
>

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Have a great day, unless you've made other plans!

[Setz...@aol.com]

Ed and others, I think we will find exactly that to be the most beneficial thing we get from this.  Many years ago, when we first returned to Huntington and St. John;s, Jim had just started his dental practice and I was in a women's bible study with Sue Johnson and others.  Sue was the wife of my childhood dentist and there is a plaque with her name on it in the Altar Guild area.  The thing that I remember most was the realization that even Sue had problems and that no one is immune from life's speedbumps!

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