“Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings, and a revealer of mysteries.”

“…living in a land hostile to their belief and filled with different gods and different values and different ways of going about life – how then can we be the people God wants us to be?”

“What is the story we can tell of the mighty acts of God in our own experience? And are we willing, like Paul, to heed Christ’s call and to testify about these things before others?”

“We find ourselves in a place we never expected to be, in a situation we would never have chosen for ourselves, stumbling along a path we had not foreseen.”

“So we could read this story of Eutychus sleeping while Paul is preaching as a much-needed exhortation not to fall asleep in our faith, not to contract a spiritual amnesia wherein we forget about God for long periods of our day or even of our lives – or even something as basic as not to forget to come to worship on Sundays.”

But the truth is that we do sometimes feel discouraged in the life of faith – it is a normal part of the ebb and flow of ordinary discipleship.