By now most of you are aware that the Fowler family is in a season of transition. So we want to take this opportunity to share a few thoughts with you and let you know that we will be making our cross country move back to Oregon at the end of April.

This year as with many “Holy Fridays” in the past, I am re-reading Isaiah 53 “The Suffering Servant” prophecy written some 700 yrs before Christ came. My approach to the Isaiah reading this year has varied slightly as I have introduced a practice I learned about recently called Lectio Divina Latin for divine reading. Lectio Divina is basically a prayerful Scripture reading practice that has been in use for over a thousand years. The practice is simply a way of ruminating on God’s Word and listening to what He has to say to us from Scripture. 

Today marks the beginning of the 40 days of Lent leading up to Easter Sunday and today according the liturgical church calendar for millions of Christians and for 100’s of years, the church has commemorated “Ash Wednesday” (maybe you’ve noticed people with ashes on their foreheads around town)— Ash Wednesday is a day of humbling ourselves in fasting, prayer and repentance as we begin the Lenten season. 

Do you ever daydream about a time when things will be different than they are now? Sometimes it’s discontentment or not being present… but there are times when that sense of future bliss is the Kingdom of God bubbling up in our hearts! 

A few months ago I was really dealing with fear and anxiety, not something I've struggled with much in my life historically but there it was. I was losing sleep, getting frequent headaches, feeling squeezed inside and having reoccurring thoughts and dreams that exposed and exploited my fear of the future. We've all likely had things in our lives that caused fear and anxiety.

I have a dog named Astro, he's a great dane, he's a BIG guy!! When he was a puppy he didn't understand waiting for his food, he would whine, he would beg, he would jump, he would puppy pout... he didn't understand we had to mix the food, it needed to be prepared for him... dinner was on its way but it just wasn't ready yet.

Jesus taught us a prayer... it was short, covered all the bases and can easily be memorized, millions of His followers recite this prayer weekly.

God is limitless, He is BIG, He has complete knowledge of all things in every way, yet He's very close, healing the brokenhearted and binding up their wounds! I was struck by this at church Sunday morning listening to Phil Comer teach on prayer, one of his big ideas was simply "Prayer is a privilege."

Good Thursday Everyone, 

Over the last several days we’ve looked at various aspects of friendship, constancy, carefulness, candor… today we consider this fourth and final virtue of friendship, counsel.

Good Wednesday Friends, 

I wanted to share the collaborative effort of those who contributed to the friendship virtues discussion, here are the results from yesterday… 

Good Tuesday Friends, 

Today I have a challenge for you, give one or two attributes of a “true friend”, A friend is…  I hope to collect lots of adjectives and then put then string them together to create a collaborative definition, so please go ahead and participate just give me one word or adjective and you can know you’ve contributed to a revolution!!

As the revolution marches on in our war against loneliness the next layer of “friendship” I want us to look at are the characteristics of real friendship, how would you differentiate between friends and merely companions? Remember the words of the wisdom writer…

One of the great difficulties in this journey of discovering friendship is that most of us would struggle to define what “real friendship” is… I’d venture to say the majority of modern people have companions but not friendship. The wisdom writer makes a distinction between companions and a friend who sticks closer than a brother. 

As promised I’m gonna be post happy for the next several days as we launch our “friendship campaign” the war on loneliness, join the revolution!! #endloneliness