Whoever pursues righteousness and unfailing love will find life, righteousness, and honor.

~ Proverbs 21:21, NLT

Don't let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me.

~ John 14:1, NLT

For I am waiting for you, O Lord. You must answer for me, O Lord my God.

~ Psalm 38:15, NLT

Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.

~ Philippians 4:6, NLT

Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.

~ 1 Peter 5:7, NLT

I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.

~ John 16:33, NLT

Why Are You So Afraid? [ Matthew 8:23 - 8:34 ]

Surviving the Storms (8:23-27) 
Throughout Scripture, storms represent the difficulties and hardships in life. There is chaos and unpredictability in the midst of the storm. But through it, we learn more about God and ourselves. Storms do not build character; they reveal it. They show who we really are. As a Christian, you are not exempt from the storms of life. God has power over all of nature and even my circumstances. Even when believers follow Christ’s bidding, we can face hardships. Faith is the ability to trust what we cannot see, and with faith we are freed from the flimsy enclosures of life that only fear allows to entrap us. Faith is not merely your holding on to God; it is God holding on to you. He will not let you go! 


Are you going through a season of storms in your life? What is your response to the storm? Are you fearful? Do you complain and become angry? The storms will reveal a lot about how you view God and how you view yourself. Keep firm. Have faith. God will guide you through the waters.

There is an inherent danger of getting used to sin and letting it crawl into your life. We fear losing it. But that sin will keep you from Jesus and drawing into deeper intimacy with Him. 




Lord, replace the fear in my heart with trust in You. Forgive me that my eyes are too often on the storms and not on You. Forgive me that I fear the change You may bring into my life. Help me, O God, to rest in You alone. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

5 Easy Ways to Learn Grammar With The New York Times

By KATHERINE SCHULTEN

Alejandro Yegros

For our first guest post, we’ve invited the good people at Grammarlogues, a software- and Web-based tool “founded on the premise that grammar matters most when it has meaning beyond a set of memorized rules,” to write about ways to use The Times to bring grammar lessons to life. Come tell us how you make grammar come alive, below!

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Grammar, Party of One
By Danielle Hoagland and Judith McCaffrey for Grammarlogues.com

National Grammar Day. Three words that might elicit an even greater sigh than the term grammar itself.

The holiday conjures up images of celebrants frantically grabbing red pens and running through towns and cities, adding, crossing out, and otherwise correcting abuses of syntax and diction. Innocent passersby and unsuspecting onlookers are interrogated: True or false: You cannot end a sentence with a preposition. Infinitives should never be split. Passive voice is always wrong.

Let’s reclaim this national holiday right here and now. Boycott the red pen that ensnares us in syntactical games of right and wrong, and pick up a piece of literature, any piece of literature, and explore the English language with fresh eyes.

Or just read The New York Times, which provides a panoply of grammar concepts that rivals any handbook. Consider the following five possibilities:

1. Variation Exploration

Reporters and editorial writers have one job in common: holding their readers’ interest. An essential tool for doing this is sentence variety, or using different sentence structures to avoid monotony.

The three-sentence paragraph below by Adam Liptak is a good example—he follows a simple sentence with a complex sentence, which he extends with two fairly hefty participial phrases, and he concludes the paragraph with a simple question:

“The proposed trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Manhattan presented perhaps the most extreme example of this conundrum. Had the trial proceeded there, a change of venue motion based on local news coverage and community outrage was almost inevitable, given Mr. Mohammed’s confession to planning the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But would that intensity of feeling be any less anywhere else in the United States?”
— “Finding Untainted Jurors in the Age of the Internet”

Try this: Find one other example of sentence variety in a paragraph from an article in The Times that interests you. Analyze it as we did here to describe why it works. For more on complex sentences, click here.

2. Punctuation Station

The Times is a one-stop shop for punctuation, with virtually every mark used in every issue.

In the sentence below, for instance, Jonah Lehrer uses a semicolon to separate two independent clauses. Are alternate punctuation marks possible? What would happen, for instance, if a comma were used instead?

Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding in science.
— “Want a Better Listener? Protect Those Ears”

There is no better model for the punctuation of dialogue than an article containing dialogue. The example below of an interrupted quote is a good demonstration:

“We need to look at noise as something that is dangerous,” Ms. Nadler said, “like sharp tools or a hot stove.”
— “Depression’s Upside”

Try this: Pick a type of punctuation mark, the semicolon for example, and scan an article to see where these are placed and how they are used. Then use one of those sentences as a model to try your own use of that mark. (And for more on semicolons, click here.)

3. Rule Breaker

You must understand the “rules” of grammar before you break them. If you read The Times regularly, you’ll see instances when writers intentionally break the “rules” to achieve a purpose. For example:

Is one of the sentences below a fragment? If so, what effect does it have on the article?

“Then came overtime. Pressure anyone?”
— “Crosby’s Goal Ends Thriller as Canada Beats U.S.”

Does the following sentence end in a preposition, and if so, is this the only way to express the idea? For the answer, click here.

“The Knicks (20-39) have lost 10 of their last 11 games and have 23 games left to muddle through.”
— “James Shows Knicks Just Why He Is Their Fondest Wish”

Why might a writer use a string of passive verbs in a particular sentence? In the following sentence, how do these passive constructions emphasize the topic?

“The roles of most of the 20,000 or so genes in the human genome are still poorly understood, but all can be assigned to broad categories of likely function depending on the physical structure of the protein they specify.”
— “Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force”

Try this: How many Times sentences can you find that “break the rules”? Which work best? Why?

4. Sherlock Holmes

Incorporating quotations to support a thesis effectively and correctly is difficult, but journalists deal with this aspect of writing constantly, whether the text is a factual account or an opinion. Consider the indirect quote below from an article on the upcoming election in Iraq. Readers do not know whether these were Suliman’s exact words; however, the statement must accurately convey his thought:

“His most prominent Sunni ally, Sheik Ali Hatam al-Ali Suliman, said the voting bloc he represented in Anbar would never vote directly for Mr. Maliki.”
— “Vote Seen as Pivotal Test for Both Iraq and Maliki”

Try this: You won’t have to read far to find examples in The Times of both direct and indirect quotations. Try conversion practice yourself by changing a direct quote into an indirect quote, following the punctuation approach you see in the Times article. For more on direct quotes, click here.

5. Confusion Central

The best of us sometimes get tangled up in lengthy sentences, sidetracked by the ancillary ideas in subordinate clauses or prepositional phrases.

Take a sticky sentence apart in order to get to its core. For instance, the fundamental information in the sentence below about the actor Jeff Bridges is quite brief: Duane is the subject; set is the verb; the template is the direct object.

“Wounded, a little lost, Duane set the template for a Bridges type who was down on his luck and maybe skimming bottom, at times with a smile that looked far too innocent for an actor who soon made a habit of quietly taking over his films.”
— “The Dude Plumbs His Weary Soul”

Try this: Choose your own sticky Times sentence, then remove (or bracket) prepositional phrases, appositives, verbal phrases, and dependent clauses to uncover the heart of the sentence and therefore its essential meaning. For more on dependent clauses, click here.

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For more grammar ideas, lesson plans and exercises, visitGrammarlogues.com.

Reader Idea | Grammar Clubs

• Run-on sentences:
  The main cause of run-on errors is the word “however”; many students punctuate the sentence by treating “however” as a conjunction. It is often not, and should not be preceded by a comma.
• Sentence fragments:
  Many fragments are created when students place a period at a grammatical boundary, like the start of a dependent clause. By doing so, students are showing awareness of grammatical structure but haven’t mastered it yet. “The sun melted the snow. Which led to flooding,” for example, shows a premature sentence boundary just where a new clause begins. Explaining the concept of clauses that can stand alone (independent) from those that cannot (dependent) allows for more overt understanding of those smaller units of a sentence and how they fit together.
• Misaligned modifiers:
  Alignment issues tend to arise when the sentence doesn’t begin with the main subject. If the writer begins with a participle (“Walking through the woods…” or “Painted on the side of the building…”), the word after the introductory phrase needs to complete the action (the entity walking or appearing in paint). It often doesn’t.
• Subject-verb agreement errors:
  Here, again, the writer needs to keep track of all parts of the sentence and how they relate. When words come between the main subject and verb, the writer can be thrown off. For example, “A team of experts is/are visiting the school” gives writers a singular subject (team) that is separated from its verb by a plural noun.
• Person/number/tense inconsistencies:
  When the writer is thinking too “locally,” person, number and tense can switch unnecessarily. In other words, the writer is failing to keep track of all of the sentence parts across phrase and clause boundaries.
• Antecedent/pronoun errors:
  This error also arises from the failure to make connections between two separated parts of a sentence. Whenever a pronoun is used, the writer should mentally connect it to an overt antecedent. If one is not there, reword. For example, “In Frank Rich’s column last week, he discussed….” Shows a subject pronoun (“he”) poorly aligned with a possessive antecedent (“Frank Rich’s”).

By the end of these exercises, students have compiled their own study sheets: What do they need to watch out for? Where are they vulnerable to punctuation and grammar errors? At a minimum, writers need to be able to identify the following crucial parts of a sentence:

• Know the main subject of a sentence
• Know the main verb of a sentence
• Know if a verb is conjugated or not
• Know what tense the verb is in
• Know where phrase and clause boundaries are

Student writers also need to know what their weak spots are. Here are some questions they can ask themselves to flag common weaknesses:

Questions to Self in Drafting of an Essay: What Needs Extra Scrutiny

• Between the first word capitalized in the sentence and the period or question mark at the end, is there a subject-verb pair that agrees and is conjugated in the tense you want?
• If a sentence doesn’t start with a subject, is there a subject-verb pair right after a comma?
• When you encounter a prepositional phrase, check to see if it is separating a subject-verb pair. Is there subject-verb agreement?
• Is your subject-verb pair separated by anything? Check for errors. Main subjects and verbs shouldn’t ordinarily be separated by comma.
• Did you use the word “however”? Look to its left and right. If you find full thoughts, you need a period or semicolon before “however” (not a comma).
• Does a sentence start with “which”? That can only happen if you are asking a question. Otherwise, you might have a sentence fragment.
• Anytime you use a pronoun, take a moment to backtrack to its antecedent. Do they align?

Susan Behrens is the author of Grammar: A Pocket Guide.