the "in the foxhole" series

I've added a link to a metapost for the "in the foxhole" series under "blarticles" in the sidebar. This collection of posts is a series I put up in February and March of 2005 as I was going through a very difficult period. During that time I was digging very deep to pull out whatever I could to help me get through it. The posts include:

Part 1 - Strength before Strength

Part 2 - Pain as Teacher

Part 3 - Waiting

Part 4 - Strength in Christ

Part 5 - Learned Optimism

Part 6 - Abide in the Vine

Part 7 - Practising His Presence

Part 8 - Avoiding a Monomaniacal Focus

Part 9 - Maintaining a Theocentric Mindset

Part 10 - Abide in the Vine Redux and Back to Theology

Some of these posts are kind of raw and not highly polished. I probably need to go back and shine them up, but perhaps they may be of some use to some.

Part 5 on Learned Optimism gets a lot of hits from folks doing searches on that topic and Martin Seligman and it's a post I go back to a lot. I also frequently review the outline in Part 6 - Abide in the Vine, which is a brief writeup of a study I did some time ago on the koine greek word translated "abide" or "remain" in the Johannine literature of the New Testament.