Hot off the press! From the first time I met Dan Darling, I knew he was worth reading. His heart spills into his books. Now senior pastor of Gages Lake Bible Church in the Chicago suburbs, Dan recognizes the challenges of believers to fit quality time with their Lord into their days.
You may have known Dan as a writer of devotionals for teens, but Dan’s message in iF@ith is for adults. It’s for you in fact. Bloggers, tweeters, texters, emailers, all of you who are accustomed to moving quickly, thinking quickly, and acting quickly while also tweeting and messaging multiple times in a day. Dan’s message is for you.
I asked Dan to tell me why he wrote iF@ith. You can read a few pages of the book by clicking on the cover photo. Knowing Dan’s heart for this book will make it an even more personal journey for you.
From Dan Darling:
When I was in college, I traveled to India on a missions trip. We stayed in a nicely appointed mission home, much better accommodations than those of the people to whom we ministered. Most of them either lived on the street or in a makeshift mud hut with a cow dung floor and a bamboo-leaf roof.
But because we were Americans used to living five-star lives, we found our own accommodations lacking. Perhaps the most frustrating inconvenience was the flaky electric supply at the mission home. It was normal for the power to go out every 10 minutes, kicking in backup generators and filling the compound with the noise of engines.
This situation made it especially difficult to use the computer. All of us were trying to send emails back to our loved ones. I’d be halfway through an email and the power would go out and the computer would reset. You can see how this drove us wired Westerners nuts.
Incidentally, it had no effect on the Indian people who lived with this every day. They were used to the stop-start of electrical power and the inability to accomplish anything substantial, at least anything that required juice.
The experience prompted me to think of my relationship with God. Many Christians live in a sort of stop-start way with God. At least I know I often do. We’ve grown accustomed to viewing church, Bible reading, and prayer as a sort of divine refuel. And we wonder why we can’t maintain serious Christian growth?
What God desires is a constant flow of power from Him to us. He wants us to always be connected, because this constant connection empowers us to more easily glorify Him. That’s what I think Paul is getting at when he encourages the believers at Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing.” He invites us to plug in and remain plugged in all day as we move through the God-ordained tasks He sets before us. This means we don’t have to “shut God off” when we’re at work, at home, in the car. We can easily think, communicate, and love Him even as we live our busy lives.
I think perhaps our generation has an opportunity to embrace this perhaps more than any other because we understand what it means to be plugged in. We understand the idea of constant connection.
If you’d like to find out more about this, I’d invite you to read chapter 8 of my new release, iFaith. In this chapter, “Your Divine Hotspot: Staying Connected in a Disconnected World,” I try to demystify what it means to abide and walk with God daily.
