In light of the economic crisis, SnagAJob.com asked 691 out-of-work adults (18 and older) the following question: Has your layoff been a blessing in disguise? The majority of those surveyed offered a positive response:

• Thirty-nine percent said being laid off has been a blessing.
• Sixteen percent said they feel it will become a blessing.
• Forty percent said it was not a blessing.
• Four percent said they didn't know yet.

My friend Linda, who teaches first grade, told me about an interaction she had with one of her students on the first day of school. Accustomed to going home at noon in kindergarten, Ryan was getting his things ready to leave for home when he was actually supposed to be heading to lunch with the rest of the class. Linda asked him what he was doing. "I'm going home," he replied. Linda tried to explain ...

In an on-line article for Leadership journal, John Ortberg discusses how adverse situations are necessary for our spiritual growth. He writes:

Psychologist Jonathon Haidt had a hypothetical exercise: Imagine that you have a child, and for five minutes you're given a script of what will be that child's life. You get an eraser. You can edit it. You can take out whatever you want.

You read that your child ...

My friend and I sat on my patio, drinking tea and catching up with life. She had just moved to a new situation, away from familiar work, beautiful spaces and valued friends, and she was experiencing the exhausting emptiness of a job that was too full, a context where she felt undervalued, and a place where friends were not naturally found. The tears filled her eyes as she spoke of her weariness, her ...

A businessman asked me if I would speak to his staff, and I readily accepted. One of his staff asked me if we could talk privately. She said, "Ian, when I was 22, I was in a serious car accident, and my boyfriend was killed. I have gone through a lot of surgery and am now doing well. When that happened, I lost my faith."

What do you say to someone like that? Well, I prayed and I said, as kindly as ...

On May 17, 2008, Christian recording artist Steven Curtis Chapman and his family suffered a devastating loss. Five-year-old adopted daughter, Maria, was struck and killed when Chapman's seventeen-year-old son was backing his SUV out of the family's driveway. After much prayer and counsel, Chapman recently returned to touring in promotion for his newest album. Elizabeth Diffin, a freelance reporter, ...

In his book Exodus and Revolution, Michael Walzer shares three lessons we can all learn from the Exodus event of the Old Testament:

What the Exodus … taught: first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt. Second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land. And third, that "the way to the land is through the wilderness."

Can you imagine what it would be like to lose three generations of your family in one blinding moment? How would you survive? That happened in 1991 to Jerry Sittser, a professor at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.

He, his wife, Lynda, their four children, and his mother, Grace, had been to a Native American powwow in Idaho. As they were returning home, a car with a drunk driver going 85 ...

Tony Snow, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, has been battling cancer, off and on, since early 2005. When asked what spiritual lessons he has learned from his battle, he replied: "We want lives of simple, predictable ease—smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see—but God likes to go off-road."

Why didn't any changes occur or any love or help come when I accepted you as Lord and Savior?

—Matthew Murray, in a letter addressed to God that was found in his car after he shot and killed two people at a Youth With a Mission training center and then was himself killed by a security guard at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in December 2007