Janina B.

  The hardest job that I ever had was working with a room full of little boys between the ages of 6 through 8. At the time, I was a behavior specialist working on my masters. I had never worked primarily with little boys and I felt in over my head. The great thing about this experience was that I had an awesome co-worker who taught me everything that I needed to know and more. I had to get past learning how to do hair with teenage girls and get more comfortable with dodge ball, become way more artistically creative, learn the simplest knowledge possible about etch a sketch, and learn when to let them be boys who like to play war games. This was a hard task for me at first because I am a nurturer at heart, and I wanted to protect them.  I work at a mental health facility, so in addition to learning how to adjust to the character of what little boys like, I had to learn how to calm them down when they were highly upset. Many of the kids that I work with have issues with emotiona...

“ Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?”(John 4:29 KJV). I don’t know the name of the Samaritan woman that the Lord meant at the well, but she is one of my favorite people in the Bible. I also don’t know what happened to her after her encounter with Jesus, but I do believe that she went home that day and told the man that she was with to leave because someone else had stolen her heart. Many times we judge people by their behavior instead of really taking a look at why they act the way that they do. The Samaritan woman must have heard some really awful things about herself to go to the well at a time when she knew that no one else would be there. Perhaps she didn’t want to be bothered with people and their options or perhaps she wanted to use that time to be alone. This woman was known, but perhaps she suffered from the shame of only wanting to fill a void in her heart. We don’t know how the woman at the well grew up or how she felt emotional...

  “Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Phillip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?” (John 14:9 KJV) I was hurt and angry to say the least. I asked God to give my family a break, but yet another death occurred. As I have grown older in Jesus, I have learned that it is safer to get closer to Him then farther away. My first instinct was to go see God, my next one was to tell Him how I felt even though I was afraid to say the words because I acknowledge who God is and has been to me.  Recently while I was washing clothes, my heart was grieving and I decided to pick up the Bible. I opened it randomly believing that I would turn to the place where God wanted me to be. I found myself in John 14. I was comforted by the beginning verses and then rebuked by the above verse. Imagine being in a relationship with someone who proves their love to you daily and then when things go wrong...

In the culture that we live in, bars have changed in that they are more refined now then they may have been in the past. By refined, I mean that you put on your business attire, get seated at a table, and a menu is then handed to you of every alcoholic beverage that you can think of, complete with a waiter who is dressed to impress who will serve you for the evening. The bars of 2020 have gone up- scale   in order to adopt to the changes within society.   I guess we can say “out with the old and in with the new” in this case.   That does not have to be a bad thing though, right? After all, Jesus also understood the importance of adjusting in order to suit to the culture that he was in. Let’s consider the wedding that he attended as an example. “ Standing nearby were six stone water jars, used for Jewish ceremonial washing. Each could hold twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus told the servants, “Fill the jars with water”. When the jars had been filled, he said, “No...

          Today as I was reading the Bible, I thought about my spiritual mother and a story that she once shared about her mother concerning how she heard God in the midst of loudness. I was then reminded of a time that my spiritual mother talked to me about allowing people to get so close to you that they can hurt you. As I was listening to what she was saying, I took note of it, but I silently rejected it as soon as she said it. I understood it, but I wasn’t ready to hear it. I wasn’t ready to allow people to get close to me even if it was for the sake of allowing people to see Jesus through me.      As I look around me today, I find that it’s hard for me to truly connect to people because I have to let them in. I can be cool with people, but they are not allowed near my heart. Over time, I’ve built a fortified house for myself mentally and I physically live within fortified gates to protect me from “outsiders”.      This mor...