A momentary prayer for the occasion of severe heart failure

A prayer for the occasion of severe heart failure.* Based on Psalm 73, Col. 1:17, 2 Cor. 12:2, and other Scriptures. To the theme: “Present tense, future perfect”. (*Series Note: I’ve always found prayer hard. What has consistently helped me not to give up is to listen in and pray along with other brothers and …

Thoughts on preaching and teaching on mental health in our church

“I have mental health issues”, said no Asian parent ever. One of the most confronting and challenging aspects of pastoring in our immigrant church for the past few years has been the deluge of mental health issues we’ve had to navigate and walk alongside. Something that Radio New Zealand recently reported on as a “silent …

How to manually clean up weird punctuation, and scrambled non-English characters on WordPress

Oh, WordPress. This was not how I had intended to work on paratext over the summer! It seems like our 10+ years hosting platform stored years and years worth of blog posts on this website using some kind of non-UTF-8 character set. However, after our hosting provider moved this website’s backend to a new server …

Job 23-24: Looking for God

Here’s a translation of Job 23-24 from Hebrew, with sporadic comments. Previously: 1:1-5 | 1:6-12 | 1:13-22 | 2:1-6 | 2:7-13 | 3:1-10 | 3:11-26 | 4 | 5:1-7 | 5:8-27 | 6 | 7 | 8:1-7 | 8:8-22 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13:1-16 | 13:17-14:22 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | Translation: 23:1 And Job answered, saying:2 “Surely today bitter [is] my complaint,My hand [is] heavy from my groaning.3 O that I knew [where] I would find him (God), and come to His seat.4 I would lay before Him judgement,And my …