The Exodus story of Moses spending so much time with God in the Tent of Meeting that his face glowed intrigues me. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if my face shined from time with God? Oh, but it does. God has reminded me of the times in my life when I have been most present with […]

You are being hunted, preyed on by a predator you can’t see. This predator seems immense and all-knowing, but he’s truly limited and stuck. Your most valuable weapon against him is prayer. It seems so simple, but it’s profound: pray so you don’t become prey. Invite God into the fight because you can’t do this […]

It’s human nature to crave comfort over chaos. The moment pain appears you run from it, seeking balanced calm. But what if comfort means stagnation? What if you’re meant to sit in the discomfort because it can be a better teacher than pleasure? Avoiding pain now can mean double the amount in days to come. […]

When you’re grounded without the ability to fly, you scurry around trying to fix your wings and control the flight conditions. You’re sitting in despair, wondering how things got to be this way. Did you miss the warning signs? Did you go off course and ignore God’s leading? You beat yourself up for the decisions […]

So often, you see the end results of someone’s victorious triumph and forget all the tumbles that preceded the glory. You celebrate a birth with hardly a second thought to the months spent waiting in expectation. You celebrate a child’s first steps while crawling memories fade to the background. You attend a graduation and forget […]

Please, dear God, make this ache go away. And if you can’t make it go away, sit in the muck with me and help me endure. Please bring respite soon! Open my eyes to see the world around me: even dead leaves can remind me there can be beauty in letting go. Where there is […]

Once you taste grief, it flavors every relationship thereafter. You never stop sniffing around for it, trying to see if this current love you’re experiencing will end in the same way. Some people haven’t felt it, so they blissfully, ignorantly love in a way that banks on tomorrow’s arrival. Those who have had tomorrows stolen […]

We want to put on a brave face and not show others our deepest aches and failures. We convince ourselves that others won’t care or they already have enough to handle, and if we wait long enough our pain will subside. Don’t believe the lie that if you just keep quiet or hide it, it […]

Death isn’t the end: not yours, not mine, and not the death of someone you love! All the tears and the grief and the loss you’ve endured gets to have a resurrection life. God doesn’t just end death; He resurrects the deaths we’ve felt. He uses your pain to ease someone else’s by equipping you […]

There isn’t a single soul alive who hasn’t been rained on by suffering and pain. What separates the resilient hearts from the collapsed souls is the shelter they seek. You can run to your Redeemer for rescue or you can stand on the soil of your self-sufficiency. One shelter is shifting sand. The other is […]