Daly Focus Blog
Somewhere around the midpoint of life, the questions begin.
Am I on track with my goals? Or am I playing catch up?Should I make changes to my life?How am I doing in my marriage?How am I doing as a parent?
“Middle age” is often defined by age – somewhere between 40 and 60 – but it is also defined by stage. Some women feel like they’re in midlife in their early 30s because their children are older than other moms their age.
Have you ever felt so caught up in what you wanted that you struggled to seek God’s will?
I struggled with that in high school when I had hopes of playing pro football. But God had different plans for me.
Learning to trust God has been a long journey for our guest on our Focus on the Family Broadcast “Abandoning Idols to Cling to God,” Christian recording artist Phil Stacey.
After growing up in a musical Christian family, Phil was featured as a soloist for the Lee Singers, one of Lee University’s premiere touring ensembles.
By age 10, Dimas Salaberrios had discovered the seedy underbelly of Queens, New York, learned how it worked, and mapped out his future.
He would become the “Street God.”
Dimas became a drug dealer at age 11. By his early twenties, he’d been arrested nine times. Yet, he never served time in jail thanks to parents who had connections to judges and the money to protect him with well-paid lawyers. After Dimas’ tenth arrest, he was sent to Rikers Island for a year.
Your worldview is important. It helps you answer life’s most basic questions:
Creation – How things began.Fall – What’s gone wrong with the world.Redemption – The solution for fixing what’s gone wrong with the world.Restoration – What the world will look like once redemption has taken place.
Whether you realize it or not, you do have a worldview. You either fill in the blanks with random answers, or you seek truth like you’re assembling a jigsaw puzzle, thoughtfully and carefully putting small pieces of information together to form a bigger, unified picture of reality.
Someone once said, “The hardest thing that I’ve ever heard was that my child died. The hardest thing that I’ve ever done is live every day since.”
Levi and Jennie Lusko are the founders and lead pastors of Fresh Life Church, a multi-site ministry located in Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, and Utah. In December of 2012, five days before Christmas, they were enjoying a weekly date-night while a relative watched their children. When the Luskos arrived to pick up their children, five-year-old Lenya was having a severe asthma attack.
As I’ve shared before, I’ve had to overcome adversity. My dad died an alcoholic, and my stepdad walked out on my siblings and me the day of my mother’s funeral. To be honest, although I usually end up with greater faith after encountering challenge or loss, the journey there isn’t always easy.
Daniel Ritchie has a unique perspective about what it’s like to experience a deeper connection with God through adversity. He was born without arms and struggled to breathe on his own.
I’ve seen government overreach and oppression firsthand. I was in Moscow in August of 1991 when President Mikhail Gorbachev was placed under house arrest. It was a failed coup attempt orchestrated by hardline communists who opposed his ideas for reform. Russian citizens were told that Gorbachev was ill. In reality, he was being held hostage.
I’ve been in other countries who closely monitored the Christian church and limited their freedoms. These governments only tolerated so much before cracking down and silencing any expression of faith.
Pressure is mounting on elected officials to lift mask mandates in schools wherever they still exist – and it’s not a moment too soon.
Thanks to heavy-hand government bureaucrats, children have been forced to endure face coverings in the classroom for up to two years. Abnormality has become institutionalized.
Enough is enough. With their parents’ permission, it’s past time to allow children to take their masks off and live like normal human beings again.
Mask wearing was implemented to slow or prevent the spread of COVID-19, but numerous studies have been released calling into question the efficacy of face coverings altogether.
No word defines marriage quite like the word love. But what is love, really? Is it simply an emotion we feel? Or is it something deeper?
In some ways, it’s no surprise that we struggle to understand love. The word we use has become such a generic term that the richness of its meaning is often lost. That’s because in English there’s one word for love with a full spectrum of nuance. You can say, “I love my spouse,” and in the next breath say, “I love potato chips.” Same word.
What kind of “sex-pectations” do you and your spouse have?
In the book Married Sex: A Christian Couple’s Guide to Reimagining Your Love Life, co-authors Gary Thomas and Debra Fileta define “sex-pectations” as beliefs about sex that couples have going into marriage.
Those expectations can often be unhealthy, shaped more by Hollywood than God’s Word. Aligning expectations with reality can be challenging for a couple. A great place to start is adopting a biblical perspective of sex and understanding the benefits of a healthy sex life to a couple’s relationship.
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.
