Artist creates life-size portraits of 23 fallen Marines

This very moving TV news clip tells the story of Anita Miller, an Ohio artist who painted life-size portraits of 23 fallen Marines from the Lima Company. Miller said that, while painting the portraits, she asked God to help her to capture their personalities. Based on the reactions of the Marines' family members, Miller captured their personalities perfectly.

Lessons learned from Raising a Modern-Day Knight

In February I wrote about how I would be taking a group of fathers through the "Raising a Modern-Day Knight" curriculum. There was a group of 12 of us, and we learned a lot during our time together.

Here are some of the highlights:

• There are three types of dads:  absent, involved and strategic. Boys need a strategic dad -- one who has a well thought out plan and vision. Strategic dads understand the true sense of masculinity and know how to deposit it in their son's life.
• Every son longs to hear three powerful and universal affirmations from his dad:
• "Son, I love you."
• "Son, I'm proud of you."
• "Son, you're good at ________________."

• A long-range plan is important for fathers to raise their sons to manhood.
• The definition of a real man is:
• Rejecting passivity
• Accepting responsibility
• Leading courageously
• Expecting the greater reward -- God's reward

• Ceremonies define and celebrate a young man's life as he's growing up.
• Joining together with dads to raise sons together provides great power.

There is much more in the curriculum, and I highly recommend it to any dad that wants to raise his son in authentic manhood.

God speaks life into Kathie Hobson's leadership

Kathie Hobson, one of the leaders at Christ-Life Solution, has a powerful testimony. She struggled with perfectionism and performance for a long time until God spoke to her about it.

Here are a couple of compelling excerpts from her testimony:

I remember sitting down one day, excited about filling out a new Bible reading chart. Perfectionists love ways to measure their performance. I quickly read through the Scripture passage for that day because what I was really excited about was checking it off my chart. As I picked up my pencil to check it off, the Lord spoke to me. He said, 'What are you doing? Don’t you know I just want to spend time with you?' It was a profound moment for me. I thought that living a good Christian life was up to me and then when I couldn’t do it as well as I wanted to, I could ask Jesus to come along and help me. I loved God and wanted to please Him, but I just didn’t really know what that looked like apart from performance.

As I went through my healing journey, God gave me a mental picture that when I was on the performance treadmill he was sitting on the comfy sofa watching me. And the look in his eyes was not one of cheering me on, but sadness. He knew what perfectionism was doing to me. He just wanted me to get off the treadmill and sit on the big comfy couch with Him. He was the one that had already finished all the work. He just wanted to BE with me. During this time I read a little quote that has come to mean a lot to me. 'When I work God rests, when I rest, God works.' Instead of a scale of 1-10, I am now at ground zero. That is where God shows up. Anything more than zero is the Kathie Hobson Show, not the Jesus Show. People need to see the Jesus show.

Thanks to God, Kathie no longer feels that she has to be a perfectionist and is less stressed out by leaving everything in God's hands.

No TV = more God?

This week my family and I decided that we're not going to watch TV for the month of August. In addition, we are not going to watch DVDs or play video games -- anything that involves using our television set.

We were finding that TV-related activities were becoming too much of our entertainment focus, and that my eight-year-old son was more interested in watching TV than connecting with the family.

So, with our August moratorium on TV-related activities, we hope to:

• Spend more quality time together as a family
• Enjoy nature and outdoor activities more frequently
• Play more board games
• Talk and get to know each other better.

I also hope that, by cutting out the noise, I will be able to better hear God.

People of faith: four questions with Tom Henderson

Tom Henderson

1.  Tell me about yourself (church, family, work, etc.)

I am married to a wonderful woman named Debra. We've been married for 15 years this past May. Our relationship has been tested, and our foundation has proven solid. I can honestly say that we love each other more every day.

We attend livingWaters Church in Lakeville, Minn. I play bass guitar and electric guitar there, and that is one of my true passions. I love to exercise my creativity in music for the good of the body (as long as I keep in tune...)

I work as a software developer at Data Recognition Corporation. God has blessed me with skills that I need to be able to support my family, and to be a blessing to others.

In my spare time, I enjoy reading, movies, and writing on my blog: http://www.hendersonhome.net/tom.

2.  What are some of the highlights of your Christian walk?

Two seasons come to mind, and they ran concurrently. The first one was leading a group of men through two life-change programs:  Heart of a Warrior and Focus of a Warrior (more information about these can be found at http://heartofawarrior.typepad.com). I had already been through Heart of a Warrior, but found that taking it again, and leading it, was much more enriching. For the two years that I was in Heart of a Warrior (both times), I felt God's presence more closely than I ever have before. It was as if my faith took one or two quantum leaps. During Focus of a Warrior, I struggled through a drier period of my walk, but I learned to trust in God more, instead of worrying about my walk with Him.

The other season occurred while I was leading my group in Heart of a Warrior. Our only child, Ian, was diagnosed with a Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma when he was six. He fought bravely through radiation treatments, but ultimately went home to be with our Lord nine months later. During that time, I saw God come around us through friends, family and strangers. God used others to provide support, encouragement and hope. We also saw the Lord use a seven-year old boy to touch lives in a mighty way. People were drawn closer to Him because of Ian's witness; what more could a parent ask for? I also received incredible insights into how much God loves us, His own broken children.

Debra and Tom Henderson

3.  How has God guided or spoken to you?

I feel God speaking to me on a weekly, even daily basis. It's in a very personal experience, the way intimate friends would communicate with each other. Typically, it's an insight into God's nature as revealed by scripture, or into my own heart, as shown by the Holy Spirit.

However, one memorable instance was shared with my wife, Debra. We had found out that Ian's tumor was regrowing, and were able to get away for a night together to try and regroup. We decided to watch a DVD in Chip Ingram's series God as He Longs For You to See Him. It's a great series that studies six attributes of God (His goodness, sovereignty, holiness, wisdom, justice, faithfulness and love). We decided that, in those hours, we needed to hear about God's love for us. Unfortunately, the discs were not labeled with what attributes they covered, so we had to guess. The disc covering God's justice got ejected right away. We started to do the same with the presentation about God's wisdom, but five minutes into the message, we were hooked. One phrase that resonated with us, and that we still cling to, came through loud and clear. In the middle of wondering why a loving God would do this to us, and to our precious son, it rang like the clearest bell: "The wisdom of God tells us that God will bring about the best possible results by the best possible means, for the most possible people, for the longest possible time." We found comfort in that. If God could devise some other way to reach the same number of people without taking Ian, He would do it.

What clinched our belief that God was talking to us that night happened later in the video. Chip was listing situations where people may doubt God's wisdom, saying "we don't know why this happens."  He was speaking in generalities, listing events like divorce and bankruptcy. Among them, he said, "We don't know why a seven-year-old boy gets cancer." Deb and I looked at each other with eyes as big as dinner plates. Did Chip really just say our situation that specifically? We had to pause the DVD and listen to it again. Sure enough, God spoke specifically to our situation. 

We don't know why it happened, and we probably never will this side of eternity, at least not in full. However, we have learned that we can lay down our need to have the question "Why?" answered, and can be satisfied instead with God himself.

4.  Is there anything else you would like to add?

God wants to speak to each one of us. I would say that He wants to speak to us more than we want to listen. There are times when I feel that God is being silent. He does use silence at times, but most of the time it's that I'm not letting myself get quiet enough to hear him. I have to wipe out the noise in my life in order to get a clear signal. That involves avoiding music, TV, movies, video games, and anything that might be a distraction. God can use those to speak, and he has before, but it's not the same as reading scripture and feeling the Holy Spirit point out a passage, saying "This is for you, right now."

In short, the King of the Universe is looking forward to having a conversation with you.

If you would like to be interviewed for "People of faith:  four questions with. . .", contact me.