Maria Ester birthday

Maria Ester, my doughter is completing 4 years old, she is a great blessing and a great miracle God gave us.

Maria Ester is now drawing even better than her dad·

10 reasons why your church sucks

First of all I would like to confirm my love for the church and my recognize of church as the hope of this world, I recognize church as a place where God talks to us, as a place to experience true community and as a redemptive potential for this world. It was a great idea from Jesus Christ.
However, I have seen the institutionalization of the church as a process that has been neutralized the redemptive potential of them.
I have seen a very good article called 10 reasons why your church sucks, with sadness, because I have checked most items of this list comparing with churches I had related.
I have sympathized most of what the friend of the author had showed, I had also suffered a kind of church abuse, and I know how hard is to recover from that, I countinously see with much sadness many leaders that had their dreams stopped by poor leaders who had shown better political influence, many of them have exiled, like me, in "open minded" chuches, others have lost their faith. With the mercy of God I have not lost my faith, but I am countinously praying for opportunities to help the church to regain their redemptive potential.

Second try

This is my second try for creating an english version for my "Check list para viver o cristianismo hoje", this is a portuguese written blog, since I have started my blog, I have received some visitors from other countries, since then, I felt a need to make an english blog.
I know that mantaining a second blog is a hard work, however, I would like to serve you that don't speak portuguese and also would like to get more partners (by prayers, ideas or anything else) for my journey.
I have an Alta Vista button in my Brazilian blog to translate everything into English, but I don't know if it works very well. Sometimes, a word by word translation is not enough to make me understood.
From now on I will work to post here my brazilian posts and anything else worth of commenting and explaining for non Brazilian readers
Thank you for visiting my site!

A lazy, lazy day...

It started a rainy day, there is cold weather coming, this is my home view now, I can hardly see Paulista avenue now... a nice day for lazyness

a lazy, lazy day...·

How to read the Bible

At the book The Mentored Life, I’ve got another interesting text from Soren Kierkegaard explaining how to read the Word of God. He told us that the loyal reader is those who search a basic faith in God to delight himself in the Word of God night and day. To get it, Soren Kierkegaard makes some recommendations:

at first, you need to be alone with the Word of God, which is not to allow that other ideas intervene in text read

second, create a silent environment for the Word of God. If we fail to do it, we can forget that we are dealing with the Word of God or we will fail to listen to it due the “noises” of our cultural inclinations

third, see the Bible as a mirror through we see ourselves and answer to what we see in us as sinners.

Fouth, this reading must take us to a deep feeling of conviction, personal repentance and to a behavior of repentance and humility by reading the message of God to us, this should allow His internalization in ourselves

Fifith, make a responsive reading to obey it and practice the truth

Sixth, Recognize that the biblical communication is done by indirect ways: Jesus himself told us stories.

Finally, read the Biblie with hope, believing that everything is possible to God, in order to make us open to the newness of God.

I take all those recommendations as a great challenge. As long as I try to read my Bible everyday, it is very easy to start reading it as a challenge to comply my goal of reading the Bible as many times as I can. However, no goal would help me to listen what God is telling in each text. An interesting thing of the recommendations above is the effort that the Word of God read (as once Brian McLaren told in one of his books) and teach us.
In Spiritual Mentoring, I found the word “bibliolatry”, which is when people goes to Bible with all their pre-conceived ideas to base their own theology. Indeed, we will only make it if we read the Bible with a teachable spirit, which requires humility, sincerity to recognize what is not in agreement with the Word of God and disposal to change whatever is needed in our lives.

Perfect Peace

I weaked up this morning with this music in my mind, actually, I have latelly waked up many days with this music in my mind, this is the bonus song of DVD Dwell, from Vineyard. I believe this came as an advice from Holy Ghost giving me the assurance of peace all day in the midst of all kinds of situations:

In You I find peace
In times like these I find peace
And my thoughts can rest
And my heart can trust
In Your perfect peace

I will trust in You (in Your perfect peace)
I will hope in You (in Your perfect peace)
I will rest in You in Your perfect peace

I will trust in You, I will hope in You
I will rest in You in Your perfect peace

This is my pray today.

Vainess

"Ah, we who still call ourselves as christians, we are all, from the christian point of view, so spoiled, so distant from what Christianism requires from those that want to be called by that name - dead to the world - that we rarely reach that level of passion" (Soren Kierkegaard)

Extracted from the bookThe Mentored Life