Job, opened with family in Florida hosting ten evacuees after a hurricane, and a prayer that hard times bear their proper fruit rather than merely hurt.
How to face hard times, and the answer is prayer — whose chief secret is simply praying. Nouwen's line: turning the monologue in your head into a dialogue with God.
Nearing the end of a year spent in Acts: a church risen out of the ashes of the cross, through joy, tumult, persecution and victory.
Paul's farewell to the Ephesian elders: warned in every city that prison and hardship await, he counts his life worth nothing next to finishing the race.
Paul proposes returning to every city that rejected, stoned and falsely accused him — and the conflict that proposal causes between him and Barnabas.
Acts 14, and a lesson in what to do when you get stoned: get up and go back to work the next day.