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Two Weeks to Remember ...

Monday, Jan 6, 2013. Many of us use the holiday around Christmas ans New Year to take some time off. How have your past two weeks been? Did you relax on some sunny islands? Did you stay in the cold north, with Christmas trees and Christmas markets? And what about your spiritual life? What about faith? What about community?

Fantastic holiday …

I hope you had some relaxing time, both for the body and the mind. On my side, I can say that I had one of the most relaxing weeks of my life around January 1st, visiting family and friends in Berlin and in the centre of Germany. Our kids have been on some musical activity week - and so my wife and myself had time to be together and visit her sister and good old friends for some days each.

After weeks of intensive work, it is sometimes good to take time off. I managed to stay away from email for more than a week. And I managed to stay away from both management and science as well. Full break. Full stop.

In the biblical stories we see sometimes, that God himself puts a full break into peoples life. He forces them to go out of the daily routine. It starts with one day off per week - with the Sabbath. But he also forces people to stop their activities by illness or by external force. It is not always good to continue what we are doing (even if it is ok in principle). But we need times to reflect where we are going. We need time to re-adjust our goals, our tools and our action points!

Get back to the core of faith! …

For me, the past two weeks also were a time to reflect on how to get back to the core of faith. I search this core every day, again and again. But with time off, this is much easier and better to achieve.

Again, I realized that the core of faith is not directly linked to activity of any kind. Worship, services, evenings, … it is all important. But the core is deeper. It is about truth. It is about grace. It is about friendliness and love. It is about purity of the mind and of the heart. It is about knowing to be a sinner, but knowing that in Christ all is forgiven, all is fine. I want to grow deeper into the purity which we find in the New Testament, which we find in Christ Jesus!

We all, in our special personal life, can follow Christ. We all, with our particular gifts, can follow him and make our special contributions. We all are needed, we all are important, we all make a difference. We are all called to live in him, and learn from his truth, his purity, his love, his forgiveness, his character … day by day by day! (Roland Potthast) ... more texts