This summer, I had my first total knee replacement. The second one will follow soon. Yes I am in my 50s which is a little young for that. In many ways, these surgeries have been over fifty years in the making. My journey with orthopedic specialists began when I was three years old. Problems and pain began when I was 15 and I already had arthritis. I was always active, enjoy exercise and going to the gym. Knee replacements were never a surprise diagnosis. They were simply the next chapter in a story that started before I was old enough to understand it. It came down to how much life do I really want to miss? Biking and kayaking were getting more difficult. Visits to stores were becoming a thing to avoid. As I’ve shared my surgery with others, I’ve received an outpouring of kindness, encouragement, prayers, and support. I am deeply grateful. Alongside that support, I’ve also reflected on something I’ve witnessed for years—not only in my own life, but in the lives of many people I’ve had the privilege of serving in the course of my work as a nurse and nurse practitioner. I’ve met people who quietly carry shame because they believe their illness (mental or physical) means they didn’t have enough faith. They have been told: If they just prayed harder… If they trusted God more… If they ate differently… If they exercised enough… If they lost weight… If they had enough positive thinking… …they wouldn’t be sick. Those words are often spoken with good intentions, but good intentions can still wound. As Christians, we absolutely believe God heals. Scripture is filled with stories of miraculous healing. I have seen prayers answered in remarkable ways. I believe God still works miracles today. But Scripture also tells a bigger story. Paul prayed repeatedly for his “thorn in the flesh” to be removed, yet God answered differently. Timothy was advised to take practical medicine for his stomach ailments. Luke was a physician. Blindness, paralysis, infertility, chronic illness, and suffering appear throughout the Bible, and not every faithful follower was miraculously healed. Sometimes God’s provision comes through medicine. Sometimes through surgery. Sometimes through physical therapy. Sometimes through scientists, researchers, nurses, therapists, physicians, and caregivers who have dedicated their lives to relieving suffering. I also believe improving your lifestyle is a tremendous help to almost any condition. In my practice I ask my patients regularly to try small changes as they do help and medical treatment alone is almost never the whole answer. Receiving medical treatment is not a lack of faith. It is often one of the very ways God answers prayer. One of the saddest things I encounter is when someone believes their diagnosis is evidence God is disappointed in them. As a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I’ve listened to people whose depression, anxiety, chronic pain, ADHD, autoimmune diseases, or disabilities have been made even heavier because someone suggested they simply needed to pray more or improve their lifestyle. Sometimes this has led to people  suffering longer than necessary, Prayer should bring comfort. It should never become another burden. Not every illness is preventable. Certainly, our choices matter. Nutrition matters. Exercise matters. Sleep matters. Avoiding harmful substances matters. Caring for our bodies is an important part of stewardship. Yet, 75-80% of deaths each year in the United States are from disease. Obviously many of those dear people had faith, prayed, ate well, and exercised up to shortly before the end. Not every disease comes from poor choices. Some people inherit genetic conditions. Some are born with structural abnormalities. Some develop autoimmune diseases despite living exceptionally healthy lives. Some experience injuries. Some develop cancer. Some, like me, have joints that have been problematic since early childhood. Suggesting that every illness could have been avoided if someone had simply “lived better” creates unnecessary guilt for people who are already carrying enough. Compassion asks a different question. Instead of asking, “What did you do wrong?” Compassion asks, “How can I walk alongside you?” As I recover from knee replacement surgery, I am praying. I am also taking my medications. I’m attending physical therapy faithfully. I’m doing my exercises even when they hurt. I’m accepting help from family and friends. I’m grateful for the surgeon who spent years learning how to replace worn-out joints. None of those things compete with my faith. They are part of it. If someone you love is struggling with illness, disability, or chronic pain, encourage them. Pray for them. Sit with them. Bring them a meal. Drive them to an appointment. Celebrate small victories. Listen more than you speak. If you are tempted to explain why they are suffering, pause first. They may already be asking themselves those same painful questions. Let’s be people who replace shame with grace, judgment with compassion, and simplistic answers with faithful presence. Sometimes the greatest gift we can offer isn’t an explanation. It’s simply reminding someone they are deeply loved by God—even when healing doesn’t look the way they hoped.

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Sabbath School Lesson for August 1-7, 2026 Introduction of Lesson 6, Spiritual Gifts Memory Text: “Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophecy.” 1 Corinthians 14:1 ESV Paul made a valid point in the first four chapters of his epistle that there were factions, wide schisms in fact, evident in their relatively young congregation. Discord was affecting their church gatherings, making them loud and disorderly. These unruly proceedings were damaging to their reputation and not conducive to their spiritual growth and welfare as a church. His concern was not unfounded, and it revealed dramatically their lack of unity and love for each other. Paul did not leave them floundering for a solution, however. Shifting to the topic of spiritual gifts allowed them to better understand and appreciate their diversity, and embrace it as a means of achieving the unity they so desperately needed to make the church body whole and thriving. Focusing on spiritual gifts, and using their talents wisely with love and humility, would do much to make them more united with each other and with God. It would also allow them to benefit from the gift of prophetic messages that are designed to revive hope for the future of God’s people. This week, we’ll explore: Sunday: Variety of Gifts Monday: Unity Through Diversity Tuesday: “A More Excellent Way” Wednesday: The Gift of Tongues Thursday: The Gift of Prophecy Sunday: Variety of Gifts Paul reminded the Corinthians that they had been led out of ignorant, immoral pagan practices by the Holy Spirit speaking to their hearts about the one true God and His Son Jesus. This unique trinity working together to save us is exactly the kind of harmonious unity the church should have. It would make the body of Christ a unified, powerful witness to their neighbors and community at large. An inclusive, profound statement of God’s unity is found in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6. Paul mentions… the varieties of gifts (given to them by the Holy Spirit), the different kinds of ministries (inspired by Jesus, God’s Son), and the many results of their activities (provided by God the Father). Verses for reflection and discussion: 1 Corinthians 12:1-3 How were the Christians in Corinth different from the pagan worship systems so prevalent there? 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 What kind of unity might Paul be introducing to the Corinthian believers in this passage? Monday: Unity Through Diversity Using the human body as a metaphor for the church, Paul showed that as part of God’s body, they all had various functions that made the body do the work it was meant to do. Each had something significant to contribute to their company of believers. They were a diverse group of like-minded people, meant to work with and for each other in unity. Their tendency to consider some gifts more important than others prevented them from having the kind of inclusive love that illustrated God’s love for them. It had led to their perceived lack of cohesiveness and disorderly services. Such love was shown by Paul to be “a more excellent way” to conduct themselves (1 Corinthians 12:31). Recognizing fully the concepts of the diversity of gifts and the unity they needed to accurately portray God’s character, Paul implored them to use their diversity to promote unity in the church. Verses for reflection and discussion: 1 Corinthians 12:7-11 What were some of the gifts Paul listed, and what part did the Holy Spirit play in giving them? 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 Why did Paul go to such trouble in giving them this metaphor of the body to represent the church body? 1 Corinthians 13:13, 1 John 4:8, Hebrews 11:6, and Romans 12:3 Why is faith considered such an important gift that it is listed first, before hope and love? Why is love also considered important in our Christian walk? Tuesday: “A More Excellent Way” Faith is certainly the driving force that leads us to have spiritual gifts. Without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6). We must believe in God before He can empower us to do His will. But, the key to using our spiritual gifts, once we have them, is through love. Paul called love “a more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31). It is also why he called it the greatest gift of all (1 Corinthians 13:13). 1 Corinthians 13, known as the “love chapter”, describes in detail what love looks like, so the Corinthians could better use love to promote unity and experience growth in their newfound faith. In the love chapter, we find that love is patient, kind, hopeful, and persevering. It is not jealous, boastful, arrogant, rude, or selfish. Love is an emotion that if practiced can be a unifying factor in any church congregation. Verses for reflection and discussion: 1 Corinthians 12:31, 13:13 Why did Paul call love “a more excellent way”? More excellent than what? How does love lead to more unity in the church? Wednesday: The Gift of Tongues It seems that one of the reasons the Corinthian church services were so disorderly was because there were so many foreign languages being spoken that it was impossible to get a clear understanding of the message being presented. Paul suggested having interpreters available for each language, in order for everyone to get the most out of the worship experience. There was evidently too much emphasis on the gift of speaking foreign languages (“new” or “other” tongues). Pride of this one spiritual gift had resulted in the unruly worship and praise time in their church. Unfortunately, there has been a further complication of this understanding of the gift of tongues over the years. Christians have gotten the idea that the “tongues” referred to in these chapters were not actual, human foreign languages, but were unknown, heavenly languages that virtually no one could interpret or benefit from. This supernatural experience is now called by some churches as “the baptism of the Holy Spirit”, and is required of every sincere Christian believer. These so-called <a class="cat-post-excerpt-more" href="https://www.outlookmag.org/the-teachers-notes-spiritual-gifts-lesson-6/" title="Continue reading The Teacher’s Notes–Spiritual Gifts, Lesson 6 Adult Bible Study Guide, 2026 3Q, “First and Second Corinthians”“>Read more…

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“I want you to pick up sunflower seeds,” my wife said, “—chocolate cherries. Chocolate cherries are seasonal,” she said “so I doubt they’ll have them.” I looked at her confused. “But it’s Christmas,” I said, “that’s when chocolate cherries are in season.” I often bought them for our son for Christmas. I got out of the car still somewhat bewildered, went into the farm and garden store and returned with a packet of sunflower seeds. “We can buy the chocolate cherries somewhere else,” I said. My wife shook her head and said, “not at Christmas time.” It was my turn to shake my head. My wife got busy on her phone, and finally held up a picture for me. On it was a beautiful large sunflower with maroon petals and a deep brown center. “That’s a chocolate cherry sunflower,” she said, “and they generally only have those seeds in the spring.” My wife had said something very reasonable, but I heard something else, something which made sense to me—it just didn’t happen to be what she was talking about. That’s a trap we all fall into sometimes when reading the Bible. What we come away with makes sense to us, that has nothing at all to do with what the author meant. That shouldn’t surprise us, considering that the biblical authors wrote in a different cultures, with different languages, and different world views. On the contrary, it would be exceedingly surprising if we saw things in the same way they did. And genealogies provide one of the clearest examples. We read them largely as a list of names, and when we see ages attached, we treat them as a computation exercise. There are two genealogies in the book of Genesis which have ages attached. Since Adam begins the list, we naturally assume it goes back to creation. For more than two thousand years, people have used those numbers to calculate the age of the earth. It makes a lot of sense. The genealogy in Genesis 5 says “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.” That’s followed by Seth who fathered Enosh at 105 years, Enosh fathered Kenan at 90, and so on for ten generations.  That means the earth was also 130 years old at Seth’s birth. Beginning from that point, they add up all the ages in the rest of Genesis 5, And finding the same format in the genealogy in Genesis 11, they proceed to calculate the age of the earth when Abram was born. Eventually they come to the conclusion that the earth must be about 6000 years old today. The human brain loves it. It seems coherent and it answers a question about which we are naturally curious—the age of the earth. The earth being 6000 years old resonates well, especially when we add the 1000 years mentioned in Revelation — bringing the total to a perfect 7000 years. That makes a very neat package, provided that it matches what the author intended to tell us. And how could we confirm or refute that? By reading what the author actually said, and asking two basic questions: What did the author actually say? And why did he say it in this specific way? We’ll go into that next time.  

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