NIKI FLORICA

God's was the first voice I heard when I woke up this morning. He didn't speak through words, but He was among the first thoughts in my head, and as I threw back the covers, I felt joy bubbling close to the surface, risen from the deep place in me where it normally simmers under my other emotions. I have things to say today and I'm not sure what they are yet. I'm just pounding on my keys and asking God to speak through me, asking you to follow where it goes. Joy is a beautifu

God is so much bigger than I've always known, and He's beginning to show Himself to me in ways I hadn't imagined before. I and people in my life are seeing miracles, feeling true Spirit-filled convictions, hearing God's will with a clarity I'd only groped for before. God hasn't changed, so I know it must be me. My perception of God's power has grown, and the more I believe He can do, the more He does. Yesterday, I needed to make a choice—a choice between acting or waiting. I

Earlier this week, I blogged about the inevitable reality that life is pain, and that we have only two options in that regard: to suffer, or to suffer with Christ. It's as true now as it was days ago, as it was months ago, as it was two thousand years ago . . . but that doesn't mean there aren't other facts of life that are equally true as well. Life is joy, for example. A contradiction? I think not. It's the kind of paradox that can only exist within the infinity that is God

I don't know where it came from—ask my family, and they won't know either—but growing up has always been a terrifying concept to me. Trading in childhood's imagination and freedom and wonder for responsibility, stress, and decision-making seems like a lousy deal. Peter Pan would agree. But that's what makes visiting with my little nieces and nephew so incredible: all of that wonder and freedom and imagination is right there in front of me, sparkly-new and beautiful as ever. I

Prayer works. Not always in the ways we expect, not always in the cookie-cutter outcomes we may look for, but God and His Holy Spirit are co

To indulge, by definition, is to "allow oneself to enjoy the pleasure of" something. And it really can be anything. We tend to think of it in terms of chocolate or entertainment, but the rules are much broader than that. In fact, we can indulge in things that, on the surface, may seem completely unpleasant. Self-hatred is one of them. In a recent Sarah Young devotion on judging, I was struck hard with a warning against "indulg[ing] in self-hatred." It may seem counter-intuiti

We already know that getting through this life with our faith intact means eternal life, joy, and ecstasy in heaven. But God doesn't just da

Peace comes from Christ. It's not something we can manufacture for ourselves, though we still must be proactive and cooperative with God's w

I've been reading through the book of Acts, and while it's impossible not to be inspired by the passion of the first Christians, I've also found myself struggling. Not with the message or the dedication of the apostles, but with the discrepancy between their time and ours. With the fiery presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives—the filling of the Holy Ghost that takes place so often in Acts and brings forth incredible fruits of repentance and salvation. I had to look at mys

When time slows down, it gives us a breath to slow down with it and savour our circumstances. To look at the little things and see what we may otherwise have glossed over for lack of spare minutes, or for lives packed to maximum capacity. When time slows down, suddenly we have minutes in abundance. Suddenly we can spend time together doing nothing but being together; we can climb a tree or lay in the grass and stare up at the sky just thinking and praying and feeling God's Pr

Jesus ... can take the tattered scraps of truth we brought to that flopped conversation, and use them to plant a seed in that person ...

Failure is one of the most unpleasant phenomenons to grip our world since Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden. Whether magnanimous or minute, the feelings of worthlessness, disappointment, grief, pain, and guilt that so often accompany failure can be crippling . . . and damaging to our spiritual mindset. Failure has the power to distort. It can shrink the grand scope of life and inflate the tiny speck of one mistake, until all we see is the task we couldn't fulfill. Som

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. ~Heb. 11:6 I'm realizing the deeper I delve into my senior year that I have entered a time of testing, a trial of my faith. Since this year began, I've felt a burden on my heart, a burden for my peers and friends outside of Christ, but also a burden of oppression. Satan has been launching a campaign against m

Sometimes answers come slowly, through doubt, like an ice-blurred windowpane that melts into clarity one steady droplet at a time. We don't tend to think in those terms, especially when it's our prayers soaring to heaven for relief. We tend to want the answers now, this minute—instant healing, instant direction, instant results—forgetting that sometimes we need to endure a time of doubt before the answers are made clear. Jesus healed a blind man in Mark 8 in a way that may se

I feel a bit like an alien. Not all the time, not every day, but some days and in some circumstances, it's true. In the times when friends look at me sideways for something I believe, or tiptoe around a topic they suspect we won't agree on, or guess my values based on the faith they think they understand, but rarely ask about. In times like those, especially lately, I've felt more and more like a creature—an unidentified praying object—some strange, archaic, incomprehensible

By faith, Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. ~Hebrews 11:8 Christians talk a lot about faith, don't they? Walk by faith and not by sight, saved by grace through faith, faith and hope and charity, following in faith. It's a foundational component of a Christ-centred life. The very nature of our spiritual walk demands it. We serve a Lord and Saviour who is pr

In my Writer's Craft course, we've recently plunged into the poignant, elaborate, and at times frustratingly abstract realm of poetry. It was only a matter of time before our skills as wannabe poets would be tested, but "confessional poetry" hardly seemed a comfortable starting point. Essentially an extremely personal type of poem focused on human pain, struggles, and taboo facets of the human experience, I didn't know where to start. After all, while we all undergo times of

“Now, Son of man, I am making you a watchman for the people of Israel. Therefore, listen to what I say and warn them from me.” ~Ezekiel 33:7 Ezekiel was among the many people of Judah taken into captivity by the Babylonian Empire. I'd imagine he was in a pretty rough emotional place, lamenting the loss of his former life, the destruction of his homeland, and the enslavement of his people. But God had plans for Ezekiel, and chose him to receive something extremely valuable: th

Sometimes when the hectic pace of life kicks up a notch, it's the most fundamental things that get abandoned first. Take cleaning for example. Your bedroom may be a pristine sanctuary of cleanliness, or a jungle of clutter balanced precariously on the line between order and chaos. Either way, there are times (and we've all experienced it) that something so basic as cleaning gets pushed to the bottom of the proverbial priority list. Depending on what type of person you are, th

Jeremiah 28—a verbal showdown between the prophet Jeremiah and false prophet Hananiah son of Azur. I'm sure Jeremiah had constant dealings with the warm-and-fuzzy prophets of his time, men who preached peace and prosperity in a time of extreme sinfulness in Judah. Why this is one of the few accounts in which we see their interaction, I can't say. All I know is that in this passage, Jeremiah exemplified a self-control that I found remarkable. Jeremiah's life was mottled with s