What If God Isn’t Telling You to Pretend?
Read The Daily:
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed. The righteous person faces many troubles, but the Lord comes to the rescue each time. Psalm 34:18-19
I think one of the loneliest feelings in the world is sitting in church carrying something heavy while everybody around you acts like heaviness is a spiritual failure. Like if you were really trusting God, you would not still be anxious. If your faith was stronger, you would not still feel sad. So you end up smiling through conversations while your insides feel like somebody dropped another rock into the jar.
I have heard all the quick-fix answers before. “Just pray about it.” “Just give it to God.” “Just stop thinking about it.” Meanwhile the bills are still there. The grief is still there. The panic still wakes you up at 2 a.m. And honestly, pretending something does not hurt has never healed anything in my life. What I love about Jesus is that He never walks into pain and says, “Relax, it’s not real.” He sits with people in it. He weeps with them. He listens. He stays.
There is something relieving about realizing God is not rolling His eyes at your struggle. He is not disappointed that the rocks feel heavy to you. He already knows they are heavy. That is why His presence matters so much in the middle of them. Not because He asks me to fake peace, but because He meets me honestly inside the places where peace feels hard to find.
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Prayer for the Day
God what are you showing me? What am I going to do about it?
God help me to see one person that I can serve through a kind word, random act of kindness, or simple gift today?
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Read The New Testament In A Year
So Pilate took Jesus and had him whipped. The soldiers, having braided a crown from thorns, set it on his head, threw a purple robe over him, and approached him with, “Hail, King of the Jews!” Then they greeted him with slaps in the face. Pilate went back out again and said to them, “I present him to you, but I want you to know that I do not find him guilty of any crime.” Just then Jesus came out wearing the thorn crown and purple robe. Pilate announced, “Here he is: the Man.” When the high priests and police saw him, they shouted in a frenzy, “Crucify! Crucify!” Pilate told them, “You take him. You crucify him. I find nothing wrong with him.” The Jews answered, “We have a law, and by that law he must die because he claimed to be the Son of God.” When Pilate heard this, he became even more scared. He went back into the palace and said to Jesus, “Where did you come from?” Jesus gave no answer. Pilate said, “You won’t talk? Don’t you know that I have the authority to pardon you, and the authority to–crucify you?” Jesus said, “You haven’t a shred of authority over me except what has been given you from heaven. That’s why the one who betrayed me to you has committed a far greater fault.” At this, Pilate tried his best to pardon him, but the Jews shouted him down: “If you pardon this man, you’re no friend of Caesar’s. Anyone setting himself up as ‘king’ defies Caesar.” When Pilate heard those words, he led Jesus outside. He sat down at the judgment seat in the area designated Stone Court (in Hebrew, Gabbatha). It was the preparation day for Passover. The hour was noon. Pilate said to the Jews, “Here is your king.” John 19:1-14
Marriage involves you in all the nuts and bolts of domestic life and in wanting to please your spouse, leading to so many more demands on your attention. The time and energy that married people spend on caring for and nurturing each other, the unmarried can spend in becoming whole and holy instruments of God. I’m trying to be helpful and make it as easy as possible for you, not make things harder. All I want is for you to be able to develop a way of life in which you can spend plenty of time together with the Master without a lot of distractions. If a man has a woman friend to whom he is loyal but never intended to marry, having decided to serve God as a “single,” and then changes his mind, deciding he should marry her, he should go ahead and marry. It’s no sin; it’s not even a “step down” from celibacy, as some say. On the other hand, if a man is comfortable in his decision for a single life in service to God and it’s entirely his own conviction and not imposed on him by others, he ought to stick with it. Marriage is spiritually and morally right and not inferior to singleness in any way, although as I indicated earlier, because of the times we live in, I do have pastoral reasons for encouraging singleness. A wife must stay with her husband as long as he lives. If he dies, she is free to marry anyone she chooses. She will, of course, want to marry a believer and have the blessing of the Master . By now you know that I think she’ll be better off staying single. The Master, in my opinion, thinks so, too. 1 Corinthians 7:33-40