Hanukkah (also spelt Chanukah) is a huge annual Jewish religious event that celebrates the reclamation and rededication of the Holy Jewish Temple in Jerusalem after it was forcefully taken back from the Greco-Syrian monarch, Antiochus Epiphanes, by a small group of Jewish freedom fighters called the Maccabees, and the miracle of the oil that happened at that time.

Like Christmas, it has become very commercial and with all the hanukkah products now available on the internet with online shopping it can be easy to lose the original focus of the holiday. However, with careful choices made in your shopping for hanukkah gifts, crafts, toys, menorahs & activities, it is possible to add new dimensions of understanding and enjoyment to this family festival appreciated by young and old alike.

Sometimes, your fears may overwhelm you to the point that you feel like giving up. When this happens, the next step is to put your faith in God. Using the help of God can make a big difference in overcoming your fears, anxieties, and depression.

The one source that a person should use as a basis in managing their fears and anxieties is using God as a basis in dealing with their fears. The power of God is the one power that is stronger than your fears and anxieties. Also, God loves each one of us and he is the one person who has the power to solve all of our problems. He will help you if you ask him to.

My best friend and I had had a major falling out.

It started while we were out jogging together and my friend said something that bothered me. I responded with a comment that I intended to be insulting. Our relationship as friends spiraled down from there.

Over the next two months I learned what it means to lose a great friend. Working from home with limited social contacts, losing a good friend proved to be especially difficult for me. In the time that it took for our relationship as friends to self-destruct, I developed a very heavy heart.

After we had stopped talking and our relationship as friends had ended it occurred to me that I had never prayed about our situation. Believing that God's will is God's will and that what we want is not important, I rarely pray for a specific result or outcome. In this case a quiet voice suggested that I should simply pray for my good friend. That night when I went to bed I said a short, but heartfelt, prayer for my friend and his wife and their unborn child.

The only way to live a happy, prosperous, successful and fulfilling life is to learn to express the love that is within you. When you meet yourself, others, and the life that you express with love, then you will change everything for the better.

Who you are is an incarnation of love because what you seek, above all else, is to be well, safe, and happy; and that is what love provides, an assurance and promise of well-being.

The absence of love, the varying degrees of hatred, create conditions of distress that destroy the cells of the body and ruin the structure of a life, causing only illness, aging, stress, and destruction.

Imagine what would happen if you made a decision not to be unhappy anymore.

Yes, that's right. Give it up. Quit being unhappy. Sure there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy--the unpaid bills, the ache in your shoulders, and your difficult parents, spouse, children, friends, and so on.

In fact, if you really focus on it, the earth has always been a miserable place and if you read the newspapers it appears to be falling apart at the seams even faster than ever before.

There are plenty of reasons to be unhappy. The sensory evidence just keeps piling up.

On the other hand, there is only one reason to be happy. You're alive!

Everyone is familiar with feelings of grief. These feelings range from mild, momentary unhappiness to feelings of intense and acute emotional suffering that take a long time to heal. These feelings can be caused by disappointment, discouragement, frustration, trouble, difficulty, a sense of futility, deep regret or some specific loss, disaster, misfortune, accident, or mishap.

Grief is characterized by symptoms such as low spirits, feelings of unhappiness, discouragement, anger, brooding despondency, depression, and intense emotional anguish. Grief affects us in many different ways:

Physically: My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food. Because of my loud groaning I am reduced to skin and bones.

It is both a wonderful and terrible aspect of God’s love that when we lose someone we love, the deep pain we feel can draw us closer to God, the author of life and death. As Christians all our relationships are a triangle, with one another and God at the head. Our deepest selves are connected to one another and to God because it is in him we live and love and have our true being.

For in him (God) we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' Acts 17:28

It is natural to grieve the loss of someone we love, and God not only does not deny us our grief, he tells us in Matthew 5:4, “Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted.” What this means is that God calls you in your grief to enter more deeply into communion, communication and relationship to him so that he can lift you on wings of angels through the grief process.

Perverse means " a disposition to oppose and contradict". This means that this word describes a society in the world as one which opposes and contradicts. In the biblical sense, this means that this society opposes God's rule and laws. It opposes the conviction of sin, the need for salvation, and all it entails. Society contradicts this by following the lies of the adversary. The adversary, the devil, follows the carnal nature of man. Jesus Christ pointed this out in a rebuke to Peter when he spoke directly to Satan saying "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savoriest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men." (Matt 16:23) This adversary knows the weakness of the flesh. He therefore, brings those who opposes Gods' rule to a point of total opposition and contradiction.

It has been said that evolution is being held up by fundamentalism and the surge of fundamentalism throughout all faith paths sends shivers through cynical atheists and mystics alike. The bumper sticker actually did get it right: "We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

According to the 1987 classic, "The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace", Dr. Scott Peck defines the spiritual life as fluid and that one may pass back and forth repeatedly through any of the four-probably more-stages of the soul.
Stage one upon this journey -that begins from within-is essentially our infancy in the spiritual life. Like a wild child, a person in this stage reflects the inner chaotic and anti-social, unregenerate soul that is interested only in its own self-satisfaction and ego, much like the stereotypical spoiled child. Stage one people may claim to love others, but their behavior reflects they love their own pleasure, money, power, prestige, and security above any other. For stage one people, it really is all about them.

Double, double, toil and trouble…” McBeth, Shakespeare’s tale of murder and mayhem, is about a battle, with lots of murder and mayhem. Shakespeare adds witches to raise the fight to a supernatural level. Witches in Shakespeare’s day were a frightening symbol of evil, flying with demons in front of the moon.

During the Salem Witch Trials. when America was new, the witches were considered very evil. Now, looking back, we think of the "witches" as victims and the Judges and Ministers as the evil villains! What a change in the world! Once, the world was looked at as a combat between supernatural evil and good.