Redeemer was born in prayer. My wife often says that she believes no single church plant in history may have had more people praying for it than Redeemer.

On February 16 the Downtown Congregation sponsored an afternoon performance by the Improvised Shakespeare Company. The company takes a title or theme from the audience and then improvises a full Shakespearean play, complete with couplets, iambic pentameter, and the use of Shakespearean plot-lines. When asked for a title someone in the audience called out “Cat food for Breakfast.” The company proceeded to improvise a multi-act play based on that unifying theme, bringing it to a satisfying and hilarious conclusion. Most of the people in the audience I talked to afterwards said they couldn’t remember the last time they laughed so long and hard. 

Anicia Faltonia Proba (died  AD 432) was a Christian Roman noblewoman. She had the distinction of knowing both St. Augustine, who was the greatest theologian of the first millennium of Christian history, as well as John Chrysostom, who was its greatest preacher. We have two letters of Augustine to Proba, and the first (Letter 130) is the only single, substantial treatment on the subject of prayer that St. Augustine ever wrote. 
 

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.
 
Blaise Pascal was a brilliant 17th century French mathematician and physicist who had a dramatic Christian conversion experience and thereafter devoted much of his thought to Christianity and philosophy. He began to assemble notes and fragments that he hoped would be woven into a book called “The Defense of the Christian Religion” but he died just two months after his 39th birthday and it was never written. Those fragments, however, were published as Pensees (“thoughts”) and it has become one of the most famous Christian books in history. 
 

During the past two years, as I was writing a book on the subject, I have spent time recalling and distilling the many lessons I’ve learned both as a pastor and a Christian about how to face suffering. Many of these principles for handling trials and afflictions are well known: We should honestly pour out our hearts to God (see especially the Psalms); we should trust and hold on to God as having a purpose in all things (see especially the story of Joseph in Genesis 37-50).