Kimber J.

Recently, I participated in an activity with my team at work.  The premise of the activity was to hopefully prove that a strong team will have synergy, which is the accomplished goal of collaboration that increases everyone's level of success on the whole.  If anyone one person is less successful with the entire group than they would have been individually, then synergy has not been achieved.  There is a difference between teamwork and synergy; teamwork helps an individual, synergy increases everyone's productivity and effectiveness. The lesson learned during this activity, for me, prompts the thought that being louder about an opinion doesn't make that opinion correct.  Being louder may be more effective because people tend to cave and submit their will to the louder source in an effort to keep peace or to move on; however, concession to the noise doesn't make that someone's noisy opinion accurate. My personality, in an area of uncertainty, is to submit much mo...

Frustration keeps me awake, and confusion muddies my prayers.  Tonight I've been reading in Matthew where Jesus was baptized and then taken into the wild for series of tests while he fasted.  What struck me most about the passages was that the Devil actually took Jesus places.  He was on a tour guided by the enemy of our souls; a traveling companion who schemes and connives his way into our minds and hearts for the express purpose of corruption and separation from God.  Maybe Jesus didn't truly experience in His lifetime every single sin that we have labeled and positioned on a totem pole, but I would dare say only a select few of us have been led by the hand through a desert to high places and challenged by the Devil himself.  This is more than just a trip to Georgia with a fiddle; Satan dared Jesus to renounce the Father of all creation as the Savior of the world.  That particular situation hasn't come up in my own life, so I'd say that the battles I'm fi...

Born into a family of generational preachers and ranchers I have never known life without the love and influence of Christ.  Up until the year after I graduated high school my family was strongly affiliated with a very religious sect of Christianity that imposed expectations onto the people of the organization for the primary purpose of emotionally charging their responses to the gift of salvation.  There was very little cognitive awareness of our foundational convictions; mainly supported by guilt and hype the depth of ethereal relationship was, at best, limited.  Once my family and I started making some changes in our approach to religion, I began to understand more about how to cultivate a relationship of reliance and trust in Christ.  The trouble was that I had spent so many years in the "grindstone" that I was burnt out and jaded with church and the attitude I had come to associate with church goers.  For several years I played the part of a believer and l...