Click on them! They're worth listening to at least once.

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Sweetly Broken by Jeremy Riddle -
A life-changing, heart-changing song for me.

Oh, What Love by The City Harmonic -
This song says it all! 

Confession (Agnus Dei) by the City Harmonic  -
I woke up once singing the line "Lamb of God who takes away ..." over and over again in my mind. I have loved it ever since.

I AM by Crowder -
He's always there holding onto us, calling us to hold onto Him.




And three for those who are hurting.  But don't listen to them unless you are hurting because you won't be in the right frame of mind to really hear it....

Love, Heal Me by the City Harmonic 
The song that inspired the name of one of my blogs -
my heart's cry for the past couple years.

Fell Apart by the City Harmonic 
One of the best opening lines ever! 
These City Harmonic songs became my prayers
at a time I was too broken to pray for myself.

Healing Begins by Tenth Avenue North
So much truth in this wonderful song.
(I don't know why the stupid computer made this one a different color.)




Honestly, can you find this kind of hope in any of the mainstream songs out there today!?! 

If you are interested, take this challenge:  listen to these songs at least 3 times over the next month or two, and see what happens. 

But before you do, say a prayer out loud that God would open your eyes to the truth about His existence and about who Jesus is and what He came to do.  (Even something simple like, "God, show me if You are really real and if Jesus really is who He said He is - if He really is Lord and Savior, and the only way to get to You, to heaven.") 

And really mean it! 

And if you want more, if you've never read the Bible, commit to reading through it once (maybe starting with the New Testament) while again praying that God would open your eyes to the truth in it. 


What do you have to lose!?! 
Nothing! 
But you might just gain everything!



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Scariest Halloween decoration ever?

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More "American Noise"

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A Skillet CD (yes, I still listen to and prefer Cd's.  I'm that old!) is in the player of our van right now.  And because I hate switching CD's if I don't have to, sorting through dozens of them, trying to find one I'm in the mood for... I leave the Skillet one in the player and just keep listening to the same song over and over again (with a few other songs thrown in too): American Noise.   I really like this song. Anyway, it made me think of the post I wrote about it 5 1/2 years ago now (wow, time flies!).  And after re-reading that post, I decided to print it again, because it stills fits.  In fact, there's even more noise in America now - in the world - than there was then.  (Anyone else getting sick of it all too?) So here it is, the previous post on it: I was driving the other day, and this song began playing from a CD my husband had in the CD player.  I had never heard it before, but for some reason, it struck me.  I don't know why, but it did.  It s
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The Bible vs. Calvinism: An Overview by Patrick Myers (a great resource)

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How to Tell if a Church, Pastor, or Website is Calvinist (simplified version)

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(For the extended version of this post, which I recommend, click here .  It is loaded with lots more information.  This simplified one is just the highlights.  And feel free to copy this and share it with others, to help them learn to identify Calvinism when they see it.  Just make sure to share the link to this post so that they can find the original one if they want it.  Thank you.   New :  For the super-short version,   click here .   And FYI:  I found a couple times when the Calvinist author of an article I linked to changed the article after I linked to it.  So if an article doesn't seem to match what I said about it, it may be because they altered it. ) We just left our church of almost 20 years because of the dogmatic Calvinist pastor who recently came on board.  ( Read my "Letter to Our Elders Regarding Calvinism Growing in Our Church" here.)   And I was thinking about what precautions I might take to make sure we didn't end up in another Calvinist church
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In "Honor" of Halloween: My Story of Demonic Harassment (repost)

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(Reposted from last year and retold in various other posts.  I may just repost this one yearly at this time of year.) In “honor” of Halloween (a day that deserves no honor), I’m gonna share with you why we don’t celebrate Halloween.   (We take our kids to a movie instead, or buy a movie they’ve been wanting and have a “family movie night” with candy and popcorn.   So no need to feel sorry for them; they are not deprived.)   I don’t expect anyone to believe me, but I’m going to share my story.    (And for the longer version of this story on my other blog, click here .)  It’s my story about how I came to fully trust in Jesus’s name and to passionately cling to Him, to never be able to doubt the existence of a spirit world, to place such a high priority on prayer and God’s Word, and to always remember my need for spiritual armor.   And once again, you don’t have to believe me.   (But don’t say I never warned you.   And if you are a skeptic and get nothing from this whole section, jus
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"The Last Goodbye" - A song for us Hobbits

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List of Calvinist Preachers, Authors, Theologians, Websites, etc.

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I  found a lot more names to add to my list of known Calvinists (found in my various  "How to Tell if a Church, Pastor, or Website is Calvinist"  posts).  But instead of adding this huge list to all those posts, I am going to put it here, and I'll just provide a link on those posts to this one.  [FYI: I added a note at the bottom of this post on May 5, 2021.] So here it is, a "master list" of known Calvinists to help you be careful and discerning about who you listen to and where you get your theology from.  There are plenty more Calvinists out there, but these are just the names that I ran across the most.   These are either definite, self-professed Calvinists or "most likely Calvinist," in my estimation.  (I haven't heard of most of them, but it's good to know their theology before I do.)   After finding these names in various places online, I looked up each person to see if they are Calvinist.  If they did not self-identify as a Calvinist, I
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Calvinism doesn't rescue anyone

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Calvinism doesn’t rescue any sinner from hell.  Because the elect were never on their way to hell, never at risk of going to hell at any point in time ... and the non-elect can never be rescued from hell because Calvi-Jesus never died for them and because Calvi-god made it impossible for them to believe. All Calvinism does is convince some people that they’ve always been saved without ever having to do anything about it, not even choosing to believe in Jesus (because in Calvinism, we  can't  choose to believe), while convincing others that they can never be saved, that God doesn’t love them, that Jesus didn’t die for them, and that there’s no hope for them. A lie from the pit of hell.  Destroying the evangelical church from the inside out.  And it will cost people their souls. [A comment I left on the Soteriology 101 post  "(Re)Thinking through Romans 9" , with a few small alterations.  And of course, not all Calvinists will word things this way.  They will try to soften
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I vote for ...

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Here in America, it's election day again.  And I think we can all agree that it's a super-emotional, super-heated, super-critical election this time around.  Everyone's fighting over it.  Everyone's demonizing the other side.  Everyone's absolutely certain that their candidate must get in or else the country's going to go to hell-in-a-handbasket.  (Actually, I bet we're all thinking it's going to hell-in-a-handbasket anyway, no matter who gets into office.) And as I walk around the neighborhood every day on my prayer-walks, I see all the political signs in people's yards:  Harris!  Trump!  Vote for love and truth!  Don't vote for hate!  Make America great again!  Take back America!  Blah, blah, blah. But in all the political noise, I saw one sign that I could totally get behind, just one : Jesus 2024 - Our only hope!     Can I get an "Amen"!?!   Of course, I have an opinion of who I'd like to see in office, and I say my prayers abou
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Why Would Anyone Follow Jesus?

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As I was listening to a Christian radio station, they interviewed a random woman on the street who said, “I think the writers of the Bible just made it up to get people to follow them.” And I laughed out loud at the thought of that.  I wanted to ask her if she ever really read the Bible, if she knew what it teaches.  Because if she did, she would have to wonder why anyone would make up some of the things we find in the Bible and think it would cause people to go, "Oh yeah, that sounds great to me!" If you were going to make up a religion and try to get followers, you certainly wouldn’t tell us that ... 1.   We are sinful and cannot rescue ourselves. (How judgmental, discouraging and helpless sounding is that?) 2.   We need a Savior to rescue us. (How humbling!) 3.   Some of the early leaders of the faith were persecuted and killed for it, and we also should expect to be persecuted and hated by the world. ( Who in their right mind would want that?  Stephen wa
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