Lord Jesus, what we feel right now is real and it is good, but we know that what love becomes over decades is something different from and deeper than what it is at the beginning. Grow our love into the kind that is not dependent on feelings alone, that holds through seasons of difficulty and…
There is a particular helplessness that comes with watching someone you love suffer through illness. You cannot take the pain away. You cannot make the diagnosis different. You cannot do the hardest part for them, the endurance, the fear, the slow work of a body fighting to recover or learning to accept what will not…
Think of every priest who has mattered in your life. Priests give constantly and receive prayer rarely. They minister to everyone who comes through the door of the confessional and the hospital room and the rectory, and almost no one asks how they are. They stand in persona Christi at the altar and at the…
When Christians in the Bible prayed for their nations, they did not pray from comfort or contempt. They prayed from the middle of it. Daniel prayed for Babylon — not his home country, but the country he had been placed in — with the full honesty of a man who could see what was wrong…
Sometimes the church looks strong on the outside, but inside, you can feel the pressure—tired leaders, distracted hearts, quiet offenses, prayerlessness, and people carrying heavy private battles. And the truth is, many of the things the church needs most cannot be fixed by better organization or more activity. They need God. That is why intercession…
You see your pastor for a few hours a week. You see him preach, prepared, collected, bringing the Word. You see him at the door afterward, warm and present. You see him at the hospital when someone from your church is sick. You see him at weddings and funerals and the events that mark the…
Someone has just looked at you across the table and said the thing that fills certain people with quiet dread: “Would you mind closing us in prayer?” The closing prayer of a meeting matters more than it is usually treated. It is not a formality to discharge before people reach for their coats. It is…
Most of us come to God the way we go to a doctor. We walk in with a list. We explain our symptoms — the relationship that needs mending, the financial pressure, the fear about a diagnosis, the child we are worried about, the dream that won’t come true, the peace that will not come….
Most articles about prayer for work address the morning. Give you a prayer to say before you leave the house, something to settle the nerves and set the tone, and then send you out the door. Which is helpful. But the workday does not only need prayer at 7am. It needs prayer at 9:30 when…
The closing prayer of a Bible study does something the opening prayer cannot. The opening prayer prepares the room — it settles the people, invites the Holy Spirit, and asks God to open minds and hearts to what is about to happen. That is an important prayer. But the closing prayer does something different. It…