prayer

The Stewardship of Suffering

AMY SHORE | GUEST Winter crept into my heart early this past year. Weariness gave way to selfish wallowing and introspection as I reflected on hard realities during the holiday season. December 31st, I found myself unable to breathe. A beautiful sand dollar, a Christmas gift from a friend, lay shattered on the kitchen floor. I fell to my knees in despair alongside this visual representation of my current brokenness. January 1st, a morning filled with missed calls and urgent messages: my dad had suffered a heart attack and was undergoing surgery. Then came January 21st when I faced the devastating reality of his death. I couldn’t catch my breath. The Learning Journey “Learning to live in the reality of His presence is the essence of our prayers and our pilgrimage.”[1] For the past year and a half, well before my father passed, I’ve been chewing on that quote from Susan Hunt around the journey to know God better amidst fear and frailty. I long to live more fully in that reality. You may have heard the saying, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” My pride wants this to be true because it means I can pull myself up by my own bootstraps. I’ve tried. My bootstraps snapped....

The Stewardship of SufferingChristina Fox2025-06-21T19:25:35+00:00

Marriage Advice I Wish I’d Learned Sooner

KIM BARNES | CONTRIBUTOR Soon after I graduated from college and moved to a new town, I started attending the PCA church that I eventually joined. One of my early visits was especially memorable. At the conclusion of the service, three couples were invited up front: the senior pastor and his wife, the associate pastor and his wife, and an elder and his wife. All three couples were celebrating 30 years of marriage. I was in awe. As a young single woman hoping to be married, I thought this was exactly the kind of church I wanted to join—one that celebrated longevity in marriage and included examples of faithful partnerships. When I look back at that day and consider how impressed I was by those couples and how wise I thought they were, it's a little strange to now be in the position of being married longer than 30 years myself. I don't feel as wise as I imagined those couples were, but I do have things to share that would surprise a younger me. Sometimes You Should Go to Bed Angry Many quote Ephesians 4:26, "Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger" as a biblical mandate to resolve all conflict before calling it a night. I think that misunderstands Paul's imperative. There are times in marriage when you should probably go to bed angry. Sometimes what you need is a good night's rest, instead of hashing things out while you're both angry and tired. God's mercies are new every morning. Sometimes sleep provides the clarity that midnight conversations cannot. Acknowledge that you love each other despite the anger, promise you're committed to working things out, and trust that morning may bring new perspective....

Marriage Advice I Wish I’d Learned SoonerChristina Fox2025-06-12T17:41:09+00:00

Growth in Prayer and Gratitude

MEGAN JUNG|GUEST “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you” Colossians 1:3). For 20 years, I’ve heard the same refrain. “I know I need to pray more...” “I know I should be grateful, but…” Regardless of location: my counseling office, a coffee shop on a college campus, or my seminary office, I have seen the exhausted, downcast, guilty expressions accompanying these words. I feel it too. I understand the tension about prayer and gratitude: I know what I need to do, and I don’t know how. Longing for gratitude and a robust prayer life is often coupled with frustration and uncertainty about how to change. Many of us feel like something stands between us, prayer, and gratitude. Some of us feel like we’re living a cosmic game of Tetris, trying to place spiritual disciplines between waking hours and a billion tasks. Not to mention a desperate need for rest. Some of us are embarrassed because we don’t feel like we have the right words. Others have pain, anger, or mistrust standing between us and the Lord. And if we’re honest, even the most mature Christians sometimes offer rote prayer and gratitude that feels boring and disengaged. (If you find yourself bathed in the mercy of a consistent, rich, grateful prayer life, we praise the Lord for His goodness to you! Please share with others how the Lord has brought you to this place. Sister, we need your witness and encouragement.) The Necessity of Prayer and Gratitude...

Growth in Prayer and GratitudeChristina Fox2025-06-02T18:08:56+00:00

Encouragement for Moms During Graduation Season

STEPHANIE FORMENTI | CONTRIBUTOR Graduation invitations. Yearbooks. Senior photos. Open houses. All signs point to graduation season—a busy and joyful time. And while motherhood is an emotional endeavor all the time, for many moms, graduation ceremonies feel like a sacred threshold where the intensity of pride and joy walk hand in hand with letting go and releasing control. In the time it takes for your student to walk across the stage, a barrage of emotions rush in: joy, relief, pride, nostalgia, and a whole new set of worries, fears, and anxieties. As a mom, you’ve watched your child grow, struggle, stretch, succeed, fail, and begin to learn responsibility. You’ve prayed over, cheered for, cried with, rejoiced with, and, at times, worried for your son or daughter. And now, the next chapter of life awaits. How can you walk faithfully through graduation season? Philippians 1:3-11 provides a beautiful guide for all you are experiencing. Much like our desire as parents, Paul writes to his spiritual children to encourage them in their faith and toward maturity and perseverance. This passage presents a helpful movement for us as moms: Give thanks. Entrust. Keep praying. Give Thanks Philippians 1:3: “I thank my God in all my remembrance of you…” Throughout Scripture, God regularly invited His people to pause and remember. Sometimes it involved a sacrifice, a song, or a small tower of stones. These physical elements were meant to invite reflection on and recollection of the faithfulness, power, love, and mercy of God. The invitation to remember is an invitation to reorient our hearts toward what we know to be true about God and to let those truths change us from the inside out. Remembering is a powerful first step toward gratitude and trust...

Encouragement for Moms During Graduation SeasonChristina Fox2025-05-05T18:43:27+00:00

Taking our Stress to the Lord

MEGAN JUNG|GUEST Take breaks…Be present…You can’t be all things to all people. Meet others where they are. Eliminate hurry. Don’t delay. Know your limits. Start exercising. Strength, not cardio. Stress makes you sick. Drink more water. Strive for connection. Make time for yourself. Get enough sleep to prevent “X.” Wake up early to do “X.” Good enough is good enough. Do your best. Take media breaks. Stay up to date. Say “no.” Do more. How did you feel as you read that list? I don’t know about you, but I felt stressed! A Stress-filled World The world invites us into its fear and its solutions to that fear constantly. We live in a particularly tense and defensive time. Fried nervous systems and dialed up threat responses crowd our communities, near and far. Well-meaning tips about stress management often invite more stress with additional tasks to incorporate into our packed lives. And if we’re honest, unhelpful messages about stress are not exclusively external. Most of us could single-handedly fill a small pond (or larger) with our own internal narratives, to-do lists, and strategies. We don’t need help from outside sources to react to stress with stress. It’s in us. Stress is a product of brokenness, many parts of it will remain until Jesus returns, and we all have it in common. And we all want relief, peace, and help. It's National Stress Awareness month, and I want to encourage you, not with psychoeducation about causes and symptoms of stress (which are beneficial!), but with what we can do with the reality of stress. Like our brother Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, we have thorns in our flesh...

Taking our Stress to the LordChristina Fox2025-03-26T14:20:02+00:00

The Practice of Prayer

KC JONES|GUEST About two years ago I went through a season of spiritual depression. Even though I was raised in a Christian home with parents who taught me the Scriptures and encouraged me to pursue God and although I knew I was following His lead, I felt low, like something big was missing. I was imbued with a sense of discouragement so palpable that at times I felt like I could not breathe. That is when the Spirit of God reignited my sense of wonder, instilled in me a longing for deep, enriching prayer, and ultimately brought me to my knees in awe of Him. For that is where it always begins, you see… with a hunger for God Himself. The Difficulties of Prayer Flannery O’ Connor felt a similar tug, as did I, to grow in her own prayer life. She confessed, “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all. What I am afraid of dear God, is that my self-shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know You, God, because I am in the way.” 1 O’Connor’s confession seems to capture the difficulty we feel when approaching prayer. First, in order to emerge victorious in this practice, regardless of the snares that threaten to entice us away and destroy us is this: We must simply do it. We must practice prayer as a discipline until we grow from duty to delight. Prayer is Powerful We need to understand why we pray. Because this is true: Prayer is powerful. It changes everything....

The Practice of PrayerChristina Fox2025-02-24T15:52:09+00:00

All We Can Do Is Pray: Prayer for California and the Wildfires

SHARON ROCKWELL | CONTRIBUTOR This year, more than one illness spread through our extended family, hampering most of our plans for Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. It seemed like we missed so much of the fun we normally associate with Christmas time that I left our tree up a little longer than usual in an effort to hang on to the season. To extend some of the festivities, I even went with a friend to see the Rose Parade floats that were lined up for viewing on Jan 2nd. I usually just watch the parade on TV, but this year I felt the need to make the drive to Pasadena and smell the roses for myself. Who could imagine that less than a week later, I would be watching some of that same area go up in smoke as wildfires spread across southern California. Our local news is full of stories about individuals who lost their homes and businesses. Many left their homes with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Yet as I have listened to the live interviews of people who escaped and who are waiting to hear if their house is still standing, or of those who have lost it all, one theme surfaced. They shared the perspective that they had lost only things. They had their lives, their loved ones and their faith. The subject of prayer came up often as newscasters casually ended their reports with the phrase “our thoughts and prayers are with you.” One commentator reporting the devastation as the TV cameras panned block after block of scorched homes even stated in a resigned tone, “All we can do is pray.” All we can do is pray? All we can do is pray!...

All We Can Do Is Pray: Prayer for California and the WildfiresChristina Fox2025-01-18T15:03:18+00:00

Nothing to Do But Pray

MARISSA HENLEY|GUEST It was around 4:45 a.m. when I gave up on sleep, got out of bed, and reached for my phone. I saw a notification from our family’s tracking app—my oldest son’s phone was out of battery as of 3 a.m., and I knew what that meant. I could picture my sleep-deprived college student in his apartment, lying across his bed, fully clothed, with all the lights on. He had fallen asleep without meaning to, which meant his phone wasn’t charging and his alarm wouldn’t wake him in time for class. My brain went into panic mode. It was near the end of the semester, so he could miss an important quiz or test. Within seconds, my anxiety convinced me that his GPA and career goals would be ruined by one morning of oversleeping. And yet, I knew I was powerless to do anything to wake up my son. I was left with a last resort that should have been my first response: I prayed. Praying for our children is a gift from the Lord, whether our children are babies in our arms or adult children living hundreds of miles away. The Westminster Shorter Catechism Question 98 teaches us this definition of prayer: “Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.” As we consider this definition, we see how prayer shouldn’t be a last resort. God uses the gift of prayer to grow our dependence on Him, comfort our troubled hearts, and turn our focus to His faithful purposes...

Nothing to Do But PrayChristina Fox2025-01-02T20:18:05+00:00

Serving Our Public Servants

DOMINIQUE MCKAY |GUEST Another election day has come and gone. Some are happy with the results and others are angry or confused. As church leaders, we can be overwhelmed by the expectations that congregations demand from us when it comes to politics. But what if there was a way to help them reset their perspectives and right-size the role of public service? Romans 13 teaches us that those who are in authority have been put there for our good — a force for administering justice against wrongdoing. This sets the stage for how we should approach our public servants. Not with suspicion or disdain, but instead with an open heart for how God will use them for his purposes, which are always good. In the book of 1 Timothy, Paul encourages Timothy to pray for all people, but he specifically calls out “kings and all who are in high positions” with a care for how they lead. This is the heart posture God is commanding us to have for our government leaders — compassionate and desiring their success. But how exactly do we practice that heart posture?...

Serving Our Public ServantsChristina Fox2024-11-03T19:14:10+00:00

Gethsemane Glasses

LAURA PATTERSON | GUEST I awoke that Friday morning in May to the same white walls and sterile smell for the twenty-second day in a row. The same dingy blinds covered the same window. The birthday cards I’d received the week prior were still taped up on the mirror on the far wall. The now familiar white blanket engulfed my legs and torso. The sense of familiarity I’d come to find in my surroundings was suddenly arrested that morning as feelings of shock, dread, and numbness flooded my body and left me wondering if I was truly awake. I’d just given birth during the wee hours of the morning and, after being returned to my antepartum room without my baby, I had somehow managed to sleep for an hour or two. Doctors, nurses, and a lactation consultant visited me in my haze, and I eventually got the news that I could go meet my child. My nurse assisted me into a wheelchair, and I took the longest ride of my life to the adjoining children’s hospital. I knew I was headed to meet my baby in the neonatal intensive care unit, but no amount of exposure or information could have prepared me for the shock of meeting my two-and-a-half-pound infant covered in tubes, lines, and bruises. The well-intentioned nurse assigned to my son that day noticed my tears, came to the bedside, and said gently, “it’s ok, mom.” “NO, IT’S NOT!” I yelled deep within my soul. From Demanding to Entrusting My internal cry that morning was full of truth. My baby was not ‘ok’. The neonatologist sat my husband and I down in a private room only hours later to help us understand that we should expect our son to die within a couple of days’ time. I felt the very visceral reality of life in a sin-sick, disease-laden, death-cursed world. Crying, ‘It’s not ok!’ wasn’t wrong. But it was incomplete...

Gethsemane GlassesChristina Fox2024-10-27T21:14:50+00:00