After struggling with her own mental health, one Kentucky high schooler decided to help herself and her classmates turn to the Lord in trying times—one sticky note at a time.

“Our school, along with the middle school, has struggled with suicide,” Sophy Jones told WKYT-TV, referring to her school, Whitley County High. “And, a lot of people struggle with their mental health.”

After seeing a popular trend on TikTok, the teenager decided to start prayer walls in her high school. The walls, she said, were created to “help spread God’s Word” to those who need encouragement.

Many of the Bible verses scrawled on sticky notes lining the girls’ bathroom walls are passages that made a huge difference in Jones’ own life.

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“God saved me,” the faith-filled student told the local news outlet.

“People can just write down a Bible verse or, like, ‘Jesus loves you,’ for example, and you can either take it with you if you want to keep it as a note; you can repost other ones,” she said of her vision for the prayer wall. “They could take that verse and say they want to read it, or we do have Chromebooks at school, so they can Google the verse.”

She started the ministry of sorts late last year, and it’s already having a positive impact.

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from faithwire.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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A women from Connecticut became the first nonresident in Vermont to end her life via medically assisted suicide on Thursday, Jan. 4.

Lynda Bluestein, 76, traveled to the Green Mountain State on Wednesday in preparation for her planned death. The woman’s son, Jake Shannon, told News 12 Connecticut Bluestein would die by lethal injection.

“I’d like to be remembered as someone who never thought that second best was even in the realm of possibility, who always believed that you can make everything better,” the woman said, condemning her home state as “cruel” for not offering medically assisted suicide.

“Our state has failed my family and many others,” she said of Connecticut. “Who can take a calendar and say, ‘That’s the day I’m going to die?’ I was astonished on how cruel that felt.”

Bluestein was suffering from terminal bouts of ovarian and fallopian tube cancers. The five-year survival rate for these kinds of cancers stands at 31%, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

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Bluestein and her physician, Dr. Diana Barnard, sued Vermont in 2022, according to ABC News, claiming the state’s residency requirement for medically assisted suicide violated the Vermont state constitution.

“Ms. Bluestein has lived a happy and meaningful life and does not want to die,” the lawsuit stated. “Should her suffering become unbearable, however, she wishes to have the option of medical aid in dying available to her.”

She reached a settlement with Vermont in March 2023, when the state dropped its residency requirement for Bluestein. A couple of months later, in May, Vermont became the second state to remove its residency requirement altogether, allowing doctors in Vermont to prescribe life-ending medication to any terminally ill person who is 18 years or older.

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from faithwire.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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Netflix is facing criticism over a scene from its popular children’s cartoon CoComelon Lane, in which a little boy dresses in a tutu and tiara after being encouraged to do so by his same-sex parents.

The clip went viral in late December after being shared by the X account “End Wokeness.”

The new CoComelon Lane on Netflix has a boy in a dress dance for his 2 gay dads

CoComelon is the most popular show for babies and toddlers ages 2+ pic.twitter.com/wSYyEZEzMJ

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 20, 2023

The series, which has been wildly popular with toddlers, features two homosexual males co-parenting a boy named Nico, encouraging him to explore his gender identity.

In the scene from episode eight of season one, the dads sing, “Something that we know about you, you love to get up and dance.” At that point, Nico changed into a tutu, put on a tiara and started dancing. Then one of the fathers sang, “If you’re not sure what to choose, think about all the things you like to do. Just be you.” Nico replied, “Just be me?” To which the dad replied, “Yep.”

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The show has been roundly rebuked by conservative and Christian commentators.

Matt Walsh, a writer and podcast host for The Daily Wire, commented, “Netflix needs the full Bud Light treatment for this,” referring to the backlash the beer brand faced last spring for partnering with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, who was gifted custom-made cans to celebrate “girlhood.”

An extended version of the scene, posted to the Netflix Jr. YouTube account, shows the two men helping Nico decide what to wear for a family picture. The boy waffles between wearing a firefighter’s outfit and carrying a toy fire truck and donning a chef’s hat while holding kitchen utensils before ultimately putting on a tutu, a multicolored hat, a chef’s hat, a firefighter’s helmet and a tiara in a picture with his two fathers, who also put on numerous hats.

To read the full story, visit our content partners at Faithwire.

Reprinted with permission from faithwire.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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Read Time: 1 Minute 26 Seconds

“Jesus has healed me.”

Those are the words of Naomi Bogale, an Ethiopian runner who moved by herself to Colorado filled with visions of athletic renown. That, though, was before everything changed.

“All my body was paralyzed, my legs, nothing, zero,” she told CBS News, recalling the horrific accident she was in just seven months ago, when the car she was riding in wrecked, leaving her with a broken back and a severe spinal cord injury.

For the first time, the center of her universe—running—was no longer possible, a heartbreaking setback that came just after she suffered an Achilles-tendon injury and lost her partnership with Nike.

Bogale had moved to the U.S., dreaming of a comeback. She had access to world-class training and equipment, working herself into the best physical shape she’d ever been in, until it all came crashing down.

Many of the medical professionals Bogale spoke with told her the chances she would walk again were very slim and, if it was even possible, it would take years to achieve. Doctors gave her a projection of two to three years and, even then, it was always no more than a “maybe.”

Bogale’s devout Christian faith led her to a different conclusion. Thanks to a dream, the Ethiopian athlete was confident the doctors’ prognoses were wrong, because they didn’t account for miracles.

“I saw Jesus on my bed [in a] dream and God is taking my hands, too, and Jesus has healed me,” she said.

Fully determined to return to her passion, Bogale began to work out again, only this time she was no longer training as an athlete. Instead, as she described it, she was “like a baby” learning to walk again.

For the rest of this article, visit our content partners at faithwire.com. {eoa}

Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2022 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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For most, an occasional sermon about tithing is standard fare. As it turns out though, most American pastors aren’t convinced Christians need to give the customary 10% of their income to the church.

Newly published data from Barna’s “Revisiting the Tithe & Offering,” a section in its The State of Generosity series, found pastors are divided on what tithing should look like for most churchgoers.

Most pastors don’t define giving outside the church as a form of tithing, but a clear majority—70%—said such giving does not need to be solely financial. And when it comes to monetary giving, only 33% believe the traditionally accepted 10% is proper.

It should be noted the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of “tithe” is “a tenth part of something paid as a voluntary contribution or as a tax, especially for the support of a religious establishment.”

One-in-five pastors (21%) believe the threshold for a proper offering is simply whether it is sacrificial, while 20% said Christians should just give as much as they are willing to offer.

Interestingly, the Barna data—collected after surveying 2,016 U.S. adults from Nov. 12-19, 2021—found that most American Christians don’t have a clear understanding of tithing.

Only 43% of self-described Christians and just 44% of church givers could “decisively” define tithing. However, practicing Christians had a much better grasp of the term, with 59% saying they knew the meaning of the religious term.

As one would expect, 99% of pastors said they understand the concept of tithing, which begs the question: Why is there such a wide gap between pastors’ and churchgoers’ understanding of giving. {eoa}

For the rest of this article, please visit our content partners at faithwire.com.