Praying with a Broken Heart
“Often we think that we need to offer polished prayers—prayers that somehow show the Lord (and others around us who might be listening) just how godly we are—but the Lord’s love for us is deeper than that. He loves hearing our voices, and he wants to hear what is on our hearts. We can come to him with gritty, desperate prayer. We can ask big questions and express our confusion without shame. God does not want to leave us in this place of desperation, but he is willing to hear words that start there. Lament requires us to be real about the pain of life rather than covering it with a glossy spin.” -Helen Thorne
All We Have Left Undone
“The story he writes in our lives and the lives of those we care for is not determined by our own ability to love perfectly. We can pray with confidence that God is working his will in all our lives according to his steadfast love and faithfulness.” -Faith Chang
God is Sufficient for Your False Guilt
“Too often, I find myself stuck replaying all the ways I could have done better, loved more, anticipated and therefore better responded, and so on. Some of it comes from conviction of sin. Some of it comes from cultural narratives or others' expectations of me. But some of it is actually feeling badly that I didn't manage to be sovereign and perfect.” -Bethany McIlrath, “God is Sufficient for Your False Guilt”
When Commands are Invitations
“As soon as you see a command over your life as also being an invitation into life, it transforms your attitude to obeying it. You no longer obey because you have to, but because you get to. Of course that does not make it easy or stop it being costly (just ask Zacchaeus). But it does make it joyful.” Carl Laferton, “When Commands are Invitations”
What Has God Actually Promised? 20 Truths from the Psalms
“Over and over again, the psalmists reveal that their hope and faith in God rests not in prophetic promises of how God will remove the current struggle, but in the promise of who he is. Even in moments where the writer uses words like ‘deliverance’ and ‘salvation’, we have no idea of the timeframe, severity, or nature of the promised divine action. Like the writers of old, we too rarely receive specific promises stating that the cancer will go into remission, the work conflict will subside, or the support money will come in on time. In these trying moments of waiting and wanting, it is our knowledge of the character of our Heavenly Father that shapes our hope in the promises of who God is for his people.” What Has God Actually Promised? 20 Truths from the Psalms by William R. Osborne
Praying the Psalms: An Invitation to Intimacy
“The Psalms show us that it is right and good to bring all our authentic emotions to God in prayer. They invite us to come to him, raw and unfiltered, in every circumstance we face. The Psalms demonstrate how an honest, angry prayer can also be humble and God-oriented, or how the act of prayer itself can reshape our fear and worry into praise. Moreover, we remember that the Psalms were intended for corporate use, bidding us to bring our unmasked selves to church and to our Christian community. Our only mistake would be to refuse the Psalms’ invitation, bottling up our emotions or attempting to handle what we are facing in our own strength.” - Praying the Psalms: An Invitation to Intimacy, by Caroline Cobb