Beginnen is makkelijk - Aanhouden is moeilijk

"Beginnen is makkelijk - Aanhouden is moeilijk."
- Japans spreekwoord

"Maar met God is niets onmogelijk."
Lukas 1:37

God laat mij de werken die ik begin goed voleindigen.
Zorg er voor dat ik steeds op het rechte pad blijf
en doorzet in het juiste Christelijke geloof.

English version > Beginning is easy – Continuing is hard

Beginning is easy – Continuing is hard

"Beginning is easy – Continuing is hard."
- Japanese Proverb

"But with God nothing shall be impossible."
Luke 1:37

God let me finish the works I started.
Make sure that I always keep a straight path
and continue in the right Christian faith.

Dutch version / Nederlandse versie > Beginnen is makkelijk - Aanhouden is moeilijk

From pain to purpose

From Pain to Purpose

A basic leadership principle says, "Go with your strengths" - take what you already do well and put even more energy into developing it. Yet God specializes in using our weaknesses to further his purposes. The apostle Paul had some sort of "thorn in the flesh," likely a physical weakness that God used to teach Paul to depend on him.

2 Corinthians 12:7-10
To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

In Business Terms ...
I think life is supposed to be difficult. A lot of life is grabbing your leg by the calf, jerking it out of the earth, putting it down in front of you, and going onward. With my disability, some days are easier than others. But for me, life is always difficult. These are issues I must face every single morning. Every morning somebody has to give me a bath in bed, dress me, lift me into a wheelchair, comb my hair, brush my teeth, fix my breakfast, cut up my food, and feed me. When it comes to the day-to-day routines of dealing with the paralysis, at worst, it's depressing; at best, it's boring. I can't live with those flat facts. I have to turn them, by God's grace, into something that has meaning and purpose.   Joni Eareckson Tada

Something to Think About:
He who can't endure the bad will not live to see the good.  -  Yiddish proverb

1 Minute Bible

Preaching to an unbelieving world

We are preaching to an unbelieving world, fighting rapidly falling standards in our own community, trying to build up those scattered far and wide in the earth, caring for increasing numbers of elderly and incapacitated and those who are spiritually sick, and all the time trying to overcome our own innate personal weaknesses, problems and frustrations " So much effort, so little achieved. Sometimes it seems as if, in certain areas both at home and abroad, ecclesial life is falling apart, as it must have seemed to Paul in those early years of that ecclesia at Corinth.

... it is a day of small things.We do not have the power of the Spirit. God does not manifest Himself openly in the mighty acts of power. We have the Word of God which is quite sufficient to convince those of a right frame of mind. But these are very few in number, so few that sometimes it seems as if our preaching and our exhortation is ineffective, as if we are failing in some way. The few who do respond are those whom God has reserved, as He told Elijah. That was what God told Elijah, and Paul quotes God’s words to him in his Letter to the Romans to prove that there was in his day also a remnant according to the election of grace, and surely we trust that it is so in our own day. We believe that we are part of that remnant chosen by God by His grace, called by the gospel, responsive to that still small voice.
Yet the vast majority remains totally unmoved. Even within the community of the saints there will always be those who are not responsive. But we press on, struggling to remain part of the faithful remnant, and we are sure that in time, in God’s time, judgment will be poured out on the rebellious, the hard-hearted; not by men like Jehu, men who proved in the end to be no better than were those they destroyed, but judgment will be in the hands of One whom God raised up in righteousness.

We shall remember that this was how Paul comforted the believers in the first century who were suffering persecutions, “it is a righteous thing with God” he said, “to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you; and to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
...
This is the day of small things, the day for faithful service, no matter how little we seem to achieve, the day for accepting whatever difficulties and frustrations come our way as a result of that service, the day for bearing whatever burdens an all wise God sees fit to place upon His servants.

 - Bro E. T. 1986

full text > Three faithfull men