Pathlight Studies

Have you ever felt like a victim? Like circumstances were beyond your control, and you never really stood a chance? Perhaps you have been a victim at some time in your life, a victim of an accident, or a crime, or neglect, or of some form of abuse. Very few of us have not, at some point, been a victim of something, or someone. These experiences leave us with mental, and sometimes physical, scars which we carry with us. The wounds may heal, but the scars remain. How do we move beyond these tragic events in our life, and more importantly, what happens when we don't? We can't begin to address all the ways in which someone can become a victim, nor will we attempt to. What we will attempt to do is find a way in which we can come to terms with the things which have happened to us, and to free ourselves from the "victim mentality" that causes us to place blame, and to make excuses for our own behavior. When we internalize the negative occurrences in our lives, we give them...

We're going to take a look at the concept of hope, what it means to have hope, and what it means to lose hope. We'll examine its importance, which we can't even begin to measure in any real sense, because without it, we have nothing. We'll look at where hope originates from, how we can nurture it, and how we can hold on to it in a world that increasingly seeks to diminish it, and to take it away from us.  There is an undeniable and unbreakable bond between hope and faith. In fact, it is not at all unreasonable to assert that we cannot have one without the other. If we have faith in God, and in what He has done and will do, for us, then we have a hope that the world cannot take away. If we have hope for the future, real hope, we know that it stems from faith in God and in His control of all things. So, we see that hope and faith are intertwined. They are in no way mutually exclusive, that is to say, you cannot have faith without at the same time having hope, and you ca...