Skip to main content

Some prayer requests

If any of my Christian bro's or sistuhs read this, I would appreciate prayer for the following long-term requests. (I don't exactly advertise or promote my blogsite.) And feel free to share requests with me, if you need prayer for anything.

1. In the past year, I have started to understand the biblical concept of the fear of God, which has been revolutionary for my spiritual life. It is barely mentioned or very misunderstood in modern evangelical circles; it's not inherently negative, and is in fact quite a blessing to understand it. I've turned more to older Christian writings and varieties of religious experiences to help me better understand and express it. But I need to understand it much better and live it out more, especially in terms of practical spirituality. Please pray for my deeper understanding, practice, and experience of the fear of God.

2. Please pray for my research - the labor-intensive design & running of experiments on Chinese psycholinguistics, getting subjects, analyzing data, and writing up and finishing my dissertation by Dec. 2007 or early spring 2008. Then I need to find a good academic job as a research professor. Also, I need to write up and submit good papers for publication soon (important for getting a good job at a good school - I don't want to end up at some place like University of Greenland, Micronesia College, or Siberia Tundra College).

3. My wife and I would like to start a family, and have been trying to have kids. Related to that and #2, I need funding sources for school, research, and family - fellowships, assistantships, etc.

4. I continue to have eye problems - eye strain and pain, aggravated by allergies and working and studying a lot in front of computers. It's problematic for studying or social interaction at times (people probably wonder why I look at them or others strangely).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evangelicalism's gradual demise

The term "evangelical" was popularized by Martin Luther ("evangelisch" in German), which meant a follower of the gospel. The term was originally a very good and useful term, as it referred to someone who believed in a religion based on faith and following the teachings of Christ, rather than man-made religious rules. It was meaningful enough but also broad enough to encompass a general theological orientation and religious lifestyle. It could include and accommodate somewhat different views or interpretations of Christian belief, including those who focused more on the grace, spirituality and lifestyle of Christ. As such, it was not the exclusive property of one religious group or theological orientation. The meaning has been generally positive in modern church history. However, in recent decades the term has been hijacked by fundamentalists who insist on a narrow interpretation of the term, insisting on a set of specific theological beliefs, while ignoring the C...
Post a Comment
Read more

Portraits of Christ: John's gospel

John’s Gospel opens with a fascinating prose prologue in chapter 1 that essentially summarizes the themes of the entire book. It introduces Jesus in a manner that emphasizes his deity, then John the Baptist who prepared the way for Jesus’ ministry, and finally, the spiritual essence of Jesus’ public ministry and outreach, and his ultimate rejection. John begins with the language of creation, showing that Jesus was always with the Father, was involved in creation, and was thus eternal. John describes him as the Word ( logos in Greek), which conveys multiple meanings. For Jewish people, it meant the Scriptures, meaning that Jesus himself is the ultimate revelation of God to us, because he himself is God, more so that the written word of God (the Old Testament, at this time). It also reminds Jewish readers of how God spoke the world into existence in Genesis 1, as well as divine wisdom personified in the wisdom literature such as Proverbs (the personification of wisdom in Proverbs ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Portraits of Christ: John’s Gospel, part 2

In John’s Gospel we have an emphasis on Jesus that is unique compared to the other gospels. John not only emphasizes his deity, but his mysteriousness. The reader is left with an impression of Jesus as a mystical teacher, in the sense that his words and actions are not only those of a profound religious teacher, but of one who is other-worldly. So often in this gospel we read of Jesus making statements that the crowds, the religious teachers, and even his own disciples sometimes could not fathom. For starters, there are the “I am” statements (e.g., I am the bread of life; I am the living water; I am the good shepherd; I am the way, the truth, and the life), which were clearly claims to divinity, for these statements in the Jewish context referred to God’s title “I am,” given when Moses inquired of his name at the burning bush. Jesus makes much use of mystical metaphors like these and others, like all the ‘day’ and ‘night’ references in this book, which portrays him as mystical or my...
Post a Comment
Read more