Daly Focus Blog
How many of you are MercyMe fans?
Many of you, I’m sure – because the award-winning Christian band with proven crossover appeal has been releasing hit after hit for two decades now. From “I Can Only Imagine” to Word of God Speak,” MercyMe’s popularity has only grown with its most recent album and its current single, “Dear Younger Me”:
And for you MercyMe fans, I have good news: I’m happy to announce that the band will join us on the Focus on the Family 40th Anniversary Cruise in November 2017!
“I dreamt many times of making it and getting in front of a crowd and playing music.”
That’s a lofty vision for any kid who’s alone with a guitar and dreaming his empty bedroom will someday become an audience of thousands. But country singer and songwriter Jimmy Wayne still believed.
That was no small accomplishment given his tumultuous childhood, which didn’t exactly teach him life was filled with possibilities.
His mother was bipolar and wasn’t receiving proper treatment, so Jimmy never knew what her behavior might be on any given day.
My marriage enjoyed a significant boost a couple of summers ago on a family vacation to Glacier National Park in Montana.
Jean, the boys, and I hiked to a place called Hidden Lake but were stopped several hundred yards away. It was spawning season for the trout, and the bears were especially active. Still, from where we were, we could see the bears splashing through the water hunting for fish.
I should say my boys and I could see them.
By now some of you have received my October newsletter which featured an excerpt from my colleague and co-writer Paul Batura’s new book, “Chosen for Greatness: How Adoption Changes the World.” In his warm conversational style, Paul, an adoptive father himself, tells the fascinating stories of sixteen well-known adoptees.
Included in the book are such familiar names as Apple founder Steve Jobs, First Lady Nancy Reagan, the inventor and botanist George Washington Carver and President Gerald Ford.
Are you worried your spouse isn’t your soul mate?
Well, let me encourage you with this: soul mates aren’t found, they’re formed over time.
Juana Mikels and her husband, Terry, are proof of that. College sweethearts, they walked down the aisle believing the planets had surely aligned in order for them to find each other. But just two years into their marriage, the planets had all but fallen out of their orbits.
Juana was convinced she had married the wrong person.
Are you feeling jaded about the election in just two weeks? No doubt this has been one of the ugliest and most peculiar political seasons any of us have witnessed. Some of you may even be thinking of not casting a vote on Nov. 8.
I hope to change your mind.
Even when our choices aren’t as clear as we’d like, elections are a God-given opportunity. Asked whether God’s people should pay taxes to a pagan, corrupt government, Jesus referenced a Roman coin.
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, once asked his fans to describe their job in a single sentence. Here are some of the responses he got:
“Look out the window all day” – Pilot.
“Get paid for answers companies already know to questions they never asked” – Consultant.
And my personal favorite: “Read things that don’t matter then write papers saying they do in order to get a job doing something totally unrelated” – Student.
“I didn’t believe in God anymore. I felt like people were offering me a broken chair to sit in.”
That devastating lie, and others, were sown deep in Lacey Sturm’s heart early in life, and it nearly drove her to commit suicide.
She was 10 years old when her 3-year-old cousin was beaten to death by his stepdad. Any assurance that God noticed Lacey or cared about her at all died that day, too.
“Where is God?” she wondered.
Many of my conservative friends don’t see eye-to-eye on this year’s election, and I suspect I’m not alone.
Scroll through social media, go to churches across the country – goodness, go to a family dinner table! – and you might see good, sincere Christians with differing opinions on who to elect for president and how to think through the voting process.
For some evangelicals, it might be the first time they’ve faced this level of disagreement with their family or church community over a presidential election.
Picture yourself in an antique store.
You’re standing before an old chair, its wood dinged up and the varnish dirty and worn. At first, you have trouble seeing past the grime and scratches to appreciate its craftsmanship.
But what if, just as you turn to leave the store, you discovered the chair belonged to Abraham Lincoln? Suddenly, instead of a banged up old relic, you’re looking at a piece of history.
What happened? The chair didn’t change.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
