Deus Misereatur

A Bright Tomorrow: Facing the Future without Fear by Jared Mellinger My rating: 5 of 5 stars Back in 2016 his then 2 year old daughter was diagnosed with cancer; then came two years of chemo with all of the concerns, exhaustion, visits, and exams. Therefore, who better to write a little book on fear and faith than Jared Mellinger, Senior Pastor of a Sovereign Grace congregation, Covenant Fellowship Church in Glen Mills Pennsylvania. Write a book he did, and what a book! "A Bright Tomorrow: How To Face the Future without Fear" is a 144 page manuscript just published in June 2018. It takes on many of the very things we fear and brings the hope of Gospel to bear on them. What keeps this from being a happy-clappy-feel-positive-all-the-time kind of work, is knowing that it was written during the days of his little girl's diagnosis and treatment. "A Bright Tomorrow" is written to "push back fear and unbelief and to awaken our souls to the boundless comfort ...

Hot Mess and Human Madness This morning I was reading Genesis 37. There in that oddly familiar story of a highly dysfunctional family – a father (Jacob) playing favorites between his sons (Joseph over the other brothers) along with the resentment that leads to the betrayal of family loyalties and brutalizing family love (Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers) – there is something going on unseen and unobserved. In this hot mess and human madness God is working. “Impossible!” someone will likely say, and they would seem to be correct. Up to our eyeballs in the hot mess and human madness, where all we see is manipulation, machinations and vengeful maneuvers, it is clearly impossible that God could actually be working. It’s not until the latter end of the story that it begins to show up. There’s the classic line from Joseph, where, in fulfillment of his two dreams, his brothers and father have bowed to him that he will say, “ Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for ...