The Prayer Porch

Tag: christianity

Cuba’s Water Crisis: A Call to Action

He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:45

Nearly three million people on that island of Cuba are living without reliable access to water right now. Not inconvenienced by water and not asked to conserve water. Living without it. In Santiago de Cuba, some residents receive water only once every fifteen days. Some communities in the eastern part of the island have gone as long as five months without regular service. Power outages stretching up to twenty hours a day mean that even when water exists in the system, the pumps cannot move it. People line up in the street with jugs to fill from tanker trucks, and some days the trucks do not come either.

The practical response from those paying attention has been clear and loving: we should be more prepared. Store water. Think ahead. Don’t assume that what we have today will simply always be there.

For many of us, though, the response is almost reflexive. God supplies our needs, we say. There is no need to worry.

And then, if we sit with that long enough, the question arrives quietly but with real weight.

If God supplies our needs, why is He not supplying theirs?

The Question We Don’t Want to Ask

There are questions we tend to smooth over quickly in faith communities because they feel dangerous. They feel like the kind of questions that erode trust rather than build it. We rush past them toward the reassuring answer before we have actually let the question breathe.

This is one of those questions.

The Bible is full of promises about God’s provision. He fed Israel manna in the wilderness. He multiplied loaves and fish on a hillside. He told us to consider the lilies, the ravens, the sparrows. Our heavenly Father knows what we need before we even ask. These are not minor footnotes in Scripture. They are load-bearing promises that generations of believers have staked their lives on.

And yet on the island of Cuba today, children are thirsty. Elderly people are going without. Families are doing the math of survival in ways that most of us will never have to do. The crisis is real, documented, and worsening. Infrastructure has been crumbling for decades, fuel has been cut off, and the people caught in the middle of political and economic forces far beyond their control are the ones paying the price with their bodies and their daily lives.

So where is God in that?

What Provision Actually Means

We sometimes carry a quietly transactional understanding of God’s provision without realizing it. We receive something we needed and we say God provided. Then when someone else does not receive what they need we find ways to explain the gap that protect our theology and, if we are honest, protect our comfort too.

We say it must be spiritual warfare. We say their government failed them. We say God is working in ways we cannot see. All of those things may carry truth. None of them, though, fully answers the child who is thirsty.

What many of us have come to believe, slowly and with some struggle, is that God’s provision almost never moves in a straight line from heaven to the person in need. More often, it moves through human hands, through the Church, and the neighbor who notices. Through the person who stores an extra supply and shares it. Through the aid organization, the missionary, the donor who responds when the news reaches them.

God does not ignore Cuba. Through the lens of Scripture, He grieves what is happening there in ways that should make the rest of us grieve too. The question He tends to ask back in moments like this is not why am I not providing, but rather: where are My people, and what are their hands doing?

Faith and Preparedness Are Not Opposites

Here is where practical wisdom and deep faith actually need each other.

Trust in God’s provision is not the same thing as passivity. Joseph stored grain for seven years in Egypt before the famine came, and when it did, the provision was there because someone had been faithful and prepared. The wise virgins in Jesus’s parable had oil in their lamps. Preparation is not the opposite of trust. Preparation can itself be an act of stewardship, of faithfulness, of loving the people around us well enough to be ready when they need something we have.

The instinct to say we are not worried is not wrong. Anxiety is not required of us and God does not ask for it. At the same time, the instinct to pay attention and prepare is also a form of faithfulness. Together, those two impulses make a more complete response than either one alone.

Where Peace Lives in All of This

The theological answer that brings the most peace is not a tidy one, but it is a true one.

God is sovereign over all of it, including the parts we cannot explain. He is present in Cuba in ways we cannot fully see from here. He is working through every Cuban believer who shares what little they have, every church that opens its doors, every act of human kindness that moves water from one pair of hands to another. His provision does not always arrive on our timeline or in the form we expect, but His character does not change because a government failed or an infrastructure collapsed.

At the same time, the suffering in Cuba is not invisible to Him and it must not be invisible to us. The prophets were relentless on this point: the measure of a community’s faithfulness was how it treated the most vulnerable among them. To look away from Cuba, or from any place of genuine human suffering, and simply say God will handle it is not faith. It is distance dressed up as trust.

True faith looks, grieves, prays, prepares, and acts. It stores water and gives generously. It trusts God with what it cannot control and takes responsibility for what it can.

That is the both-and worth sitting with today.

Lord, we bring Cuba to You today, and every place where people are thirsty and the water does not come. We confess that we do not always understand Your ways, and we ask You to hold what we cannot hold. Give us grieving hearts that will not look away. Give us generous hands that move provision toward those who need it. And give us the wisdom to know the difference between the peace You offer and the comfort we sometimes mistake for it. Amen.

Filter of Hope wants to give clean water to families – the physical health benefits are countless. They go beyond the physical benefits and help people spiritually by explaining how they can know God personally.

Do you find it hard to hold faith in God’s provision alongside the reality of suffering in the world? How do you sit with that tension? I would love to hear your honest thoughts in the comments.

06/19/2026
Compassion: The Heart of Jesus’ Teachings

He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat.” Luke 5:3

I don’t always understand the words spoken at Polish Mass. The rhythm of the language washes over me like water – familiar in sound, foreign in meaning and yet something still arrives. Something settles in the heart that doesn’t need a perfect translation.

This past Sunday, I sat with my notebook open and caught what I could. One phrase came through clearly enough to write down: Jezus uczynił wszystko z litości. Jesus did everything out of compassion.

The priest was speaking about Luke 5, the scene at the Lake of Gennesaret where the crowd pressed so close that Jesus stepped into Simon’s boat and pushed out from shore. He sat down – teachers sat in those days when they were about to say something important and He taught the people from the water.

Out of compassion.

I find myself turning that phrase over slowly, the way you might turn a stone in your palm. Not Jesus taught because it was His duty. Not Jesus taught because the crowd demanded it. But because something moved in Him when He looked out at those people gathered at the water’s edge, hungry and leaning in. Compassion isn’t a policy. It isn’t a method. It’s a movement of the heart.

And here is what strikes me: He didn’t wait for a more suitable moment. There was no pulpit, no prepared room, no ideal setting. There was a borrowed boat, a tired fisherman, and a crowd that needed something He had to give. So He used what was available. He taught from where He was.

I wonder sometimes if we wait too long for the right conditions before we offer what we have. Before we speak what we know to be true, before we reach toward someone, before we let my faith do something visible in the world. I tell myself the moment isn’t quite right and we need to be more prepared.

But compassion doesn’t wait for the right conditions. Compassion sees the crowd and gets in the boat.

I couldn’t follow every word of that homily. But somehow, in the gap between languages, this is what I heard: Jesus did everything out of compassion. Even this, the teaching, the reaching. All of it was moved by love, not obligation.

Maybe that’s the quietest and most revolutionary thing about Him.

Lord, move me the way You moved. Not out of duty or performance, but out of something genuine and tender. When I see someone leaning in – hungry, waiting, hoping – let compassion be what gets me in the boat. Amen.

Have you ever received something meaningful in an unexpected setting – a place or a moment where you didn’t expect to hear from God? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

06/14/2026
Finding Hope in Suffering: A Gentle Conversation

We need to talk about something hard today on the porch.

Not with a pointed finger. Not with a raised voice. But with the kind of honesty that only comes when we trust each other enough to sit in the uncomfortable places together.

Because some of you reading this are suffering in ways that most people around you cannot see. Physical pain that does not stop. Emotional pain that has gone on so long you have forgotten what it felt like before it was there. And somewhere in the quiet of your hardest moments the thought has crossed your mind that maybe ending it on your own terms is the most merciful choice left.

We are not here to shame that thought. We are here to sit with you in it.

Assisted suicide is becoming more widely accepted in our culture and more legally available in many places. And we understand why. When someone we love is suffering without relief, when the body is failing and the pain is relentless, the desire to end that suffering feels like an act of compassion. The heart behind it is not wicked. It is human.

But we believe something different about suffering. And we want to share it gently.

Psalm 139:16 tells us that every day of our lives was written in God’s book before one of them came to be. Not just the good days. All of them. The hard ones. The ones that feel impossibly long. The ones where we are holding on by a thread we cannot even see anymore. Those days were known by God before we lived them and He has not abandoned us in them.

Job knew suffering that most of us will never touch. He lost everything – his children, his health, his livelihood, his dignity. He sat in ashes and scraped his wounds with broken pottery. And he said things to God that would make a lot of Sunday morning congregations uncomfortable. He was raw and angry and desperate. But he did not let go of God nor did God let go of him.

The sanctity of life is not a rule God made to make our suffering longer. It is a reflection of something profound – that our lives belong to Him. That we are not accidents. That even in the valley of the shadow of death He is there. Psalm 23 does not say He removes the valley. It says He walks through it with us.

We also want to speak to the one whose suffering is not physical. The one whose pain lives in the mind and the soul. Depression lies. It tells you that you are a burden, that things will never change, that the people around you would be better off. None of that is true. Not one word of it. And the fact that you are still here, still reading, still breathing means the story is not over.

Romans 8:38-39 says that nothing -not death, not life, not things present, not things to come -can separate us from the love of God. Nothing you are feeling right now has moved you outside the reach of that love. Not your darkest thought or your longest night. Not the pain that has no name.

We do not have easy answers for suffering. The porch has never been a place for easy answers. But we do have a God who entered human flesh specifically so He could know what it felt like to hurt. Jesus wept and Jesus bled. Jesus cried out from the cross asking why God had forsaken Him. He is not unfamiliar with your pain. He wore it.

If you are in a dark place today please do not navigate it alone. Tell someone. Reach out. There are people whose whole purpose is to sit with you in this.

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You are not a burden. You are not beyond hope. And this porch will always be a place where you are welcome exactly as you are, in whatever you are carrying today.

We see you. God sees you and we are so glad you are here.

Lord, we bring You the ones who are suffering today in ways we cannot fully see or understand. The ones whose bodies are failing them and the ones whose minds will not give them rest. The ones who are so tired of hurting that they are considering options that break our hearts. Meet them right there and let them feel You closer than their next breath. Give them one reason to hold on today. And tomorrow give them one more. Remind them that their life is written in Your hand and You are not finished with their story. Surround them with people who will sit with them in the dark and not run from it. In the precious name of Jesus, Amen.

If someone you love is struggling today, will you share this post with them? And if you are the one struggling, we are here. You are not alone.

05/13/2026
Honoring All Mothers: A Careful Look at Grief and Joy

Mother’s Day is coming.

The stores know it. The commercials know it. The flower shops and the brunch menus and the greeting card aisles all know it. And for some of us that is a beautiful thing. A reason to celebrate, to gather, to say out loud what we sometimes forget to say the other 364 days of the year.

But we want to sit on the porch today with the mothers the commercials forget.

We want to sit with the woman who is scrolling through her phone this weekend seeing everyone else’s celebrations while her arms still remember the weight of the baby she never got to bring home. The one who painted a nursery and chose a name and loved with her whole heart before the world ever had a chance to know. You are a mother. Your grief is real. And God has not forgotten the child He knew before you did.

Psalm 34:18 says “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” He is not far from you this weekend. He is closest to you right where the ache is deepest.

We want to sit with the woman who lost her mother this year. Or ten years ago. Or thirty years ago and still reaches for the phone on Mother’s Day before remembering. Grief does not follow a calendar and love does not have an expiration date. Missing her is not weakness. It is the evidence of something that mattered.

We want to sit with the mother whose adult children are busy. Or distant. Or difficult. The one who raised them, poured herself into them, prayed over them in the dark, and now waits for a text that comes late or not at all. The one who would never say it out loud but carries a quiet wondering about whether any of it mattered.

It mattered. Every sleepless night mattered. Every prayer mattered. Every sacrifice that no one saw and no one thanked you for mattered. Galatians 6:9 reminds us “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Your harvest is coming. Do not give up on them.

And we want to sit with the mother in the nursing home. The one in the chair by the window on Sunday afternoon watching the parking lot. The one whose hands still remember rocking babies even when her mind can no longer recall their names. The one whose children mean to visit and keep meaning to visit and somehow Sunday comes and goes and the chair by the window stays empty.

She is still a mother. Her love did not diminish when her memory did. And if no one comes this Sunday we pray she feels the presence of the One who never leaves. Isaiah 46:4 promises “Even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made and I will bear. I will carry and will save.” He carries what we cannot carry. He remembers what the mind forgets. He sits in the chair beside her even when we do not.

Mother’s Day is joyful and we do not want to take that from anyone. But joy and grief live in the same house sometimes. And the truest thing we can do on a day like this is make room for both.

So if you are celebrating this weekend, celebrate fully. And if you are grieving this weekend, grieve honestly. And if you are somewhere in between, holding joy in one hand and sorrow in the other, you are in very good company on this porch.

You are seen. You are known. You are loved by a God who called Himself a comforter, who compared His own love to that of a mother who cannot forget her nursing child, who said even if she forgets, I will not forget you.

He has not forgotten you. Not today. Not ever.

Happy Mother’s Day to every kind of mother. Every kind of daughter. Every woman carrying something tender this weekend.

We see you.

Lord, this weekend we bring You every mother who is hurting. The ones grieving babies they never got to hold. The ones missing mothers they can no longer call. The ones waiting by the phone for children who have grown distant. The ones sitting by windows in quiet rooms hoping someone remembers. Meet them where they are. Let them feel Your presence so close it feels like arms around them. Remind them that they are seen and known and deeply loved by You. And for every mother celebrating this weekend, multiply their joy. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Whatever this Mother’s Day holds for you, we are glad you are here on the porch. Will you share how we can pray for you this weekend in the comments?

05/08/2026
Finding Strength in Weakness: The Beauty of Real Faith

Pablo Picasso once said, “Good taste is the enemy of great art.”

He was talking about painting. But sit with that for a moment on the porch and see if it doesn’t say something true about faith too.

Good taste is about refinement. About knowing what belongs and what doesn’t. About edges that are clean and surfaces that are smooth and nothing too raw or uncomfortable left showing. Good taste keeps everything presentable.

But art is not about presentable. Art is about human. And human is messy.

So is the gospel.

We have spent a great deal of energy in the church making Christianity tasteful. Polished testimonies with tidy endings. Struggles that are always safely in the past tense. Prayers that sound composed. Faces that look like they have it together. We have refined the faith until it gleams and somewhere in all that polishing we have lost the thing that makes it real.

Here is what we know to be true: you are not useless to God because you are broken. You are useless to God if you pretend you are not.

The most powerful moment in all of Scripture may be the one that takes place in a garden before dawn, when a woman named Mary Magdalene stands outside an empty tomb and weeps. She is not composed. She is not refined. She has nothing left. The one she loved is gone and she doesn’t even know where they have put him. She is, by every measure, a mess.

And into that mess, Jesus speaks her name.

Not the cleaned-up version of her name. Not the Mary she was trying to become. Her name. As she was. Standing there undone in the early morning dark.

And she became the first witness to the resurrection. Not a theologian. Not a Pharisee with impressive credentials. A broken woman who showed up weeping and met the risen Christ in her mess.

That is not an accident. That is the whole story.

Paul understood this. He wrote from his own unresolved weakness in 2 Corinthians 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Not after the weakness is resolved. Not once you have worked through it. In it. The power of God shows up most clearly in the places we have stopped pretending are fine.

God is not looking for refined. He is looking for real.

He takes the jagged edges and the unfinished places and the parts of us we would never put on display and He makes something out of them that good taste never could. He is less interested in our polish than our surrender. Less moved by our composure than our honesty. He has always done His best work in the mess.

The clay on the ground. The tears in the garden. The cross on the hill.

None of it was tasteful. All of it was holy.

So we lay down the performance this morning. We stop smoothing the edges long enough to let God work with what is actually there. We bring the unfinished, unresolved, unpolished version of ourselves to the porch and we let that be enough.

Because it is. It always has been.

Lord, forgive us for the energy we spend trying to look like we have it together. For the testimonies we rehearse and the struggles we hide and the prayers we dress up before we bring them to You. Today we come as we are. Messy and real and trusting that Your power shows up best in exactly this kind of weakness. Make something beautiful out of what we have been too ashamed to show You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

05/06/2026
The Ragamuffin and The Holy Life

There is a moment in the film Ragamuffin where you stop watching a movie and start watching a mirror. Rich Mullins was barefoot, restless, brilliant, and broken and somehow more surrendered to God than most polished pews will ever produce. He did not fit the mold of the Christian celebrity he accidentally became. He gave away his royalties, moved to a Navajo reservation, and lived on little more than what a Navajo family might earn. He was, by every worldly measure, a non-conformist.

And perhaps that is exactly what holiness looks like when it is the real thing.

We have dressed holiness up for so long that we barely recognize it when it shows up barefoot. We expect it to be tidy and triumphant, well-spoken and well-funded. But the saints who have left the deepest marks on the kingdom tend to look more like Rich Mullins than a keynote speaker at a conference. They are people who got so close to Jesus that the world stopped making sense to them.

Rich said it plainly: “I think I would rather live on the verge of falling, and let my security be in the all-sufficiency of the grace of God, than to live in some kind of pietistic illusion of moral excellence.”

That is not a man chasing comfort. That is a man chasing God.

He also said: “I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ’s birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It’s nice to find theological justification for your quirks.”

We smile at that. But underneath the humor is something profound. God has always chosen the unlikely, the overlooked, the ones who do not quite fit. The ragamuffins. The barefoot ones. The ones sitting at rickety pianos in torn jeans when everyone else is dressed up and playing it safe.

Romans 12:2 says it this way: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Non-conformity is not a personality type. It is a posture of the soul. It is what happens when we are so filled with the Spirit that the things the world offers simply lose their appeal.

Rich Mullins lost his appeal for fame, for affluence, for the polished version of Christian life long before he died on that Kansas highway in 1997. What he never lost was his appetite for God. And maybe that is the whole point.

Holiness is not about being better than everyone else. It is about being so in love with Jesus that you are willing to be different for His sake. To give when the world hoards. To serve when the world climbs. To sit quietly with the poor when the world chases the platform.

Rich left us this: “Be God’s.” Just two words. Written in autographs, spoken from stages, whispered in the quiet of a life that did not look like success but somehow smelled like the kingdom.

We do not need more polished Christians. We need more ragamuffins. More barefoot believers who are too busy loving Jesus to worry about what anyone thinks of them.

So today we ask ourselves the question Rich Mullins quietly asked with his whole life: what would it look like to stop conforming and start surrendering?

Lord, make us brave enough to be ragamuffins for You. Loosen our grip on the things that do not matter. Remind us that holiness is not a performance but a surrender. And when the world looks at us sideways, let us remember that You have always shown up on the fringes, among the barefoot and the broken, with more grace than we deserve and more love than we can hold. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

04/30/2026
Finding Stillness: Embracing God’s Invitation to Rest

There are seasons when God does not ask us to figure it out. He simply asks us to show up.

We have been there – haven’t we? We move through our days perform our faith, perform our marriages, perform our lives and check the boxes. Saying the right things. Keeping it together for everyone who is watching. Sound familiar?

And then, quietly, God points to a little place.

Maybe it is a stretch of coastline where the waves do not care how well you are doing. Maybe it is a chair by a window with a view that asks nothing of you. Maybe it is simply the seat beside someone you love, with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.

He leads us there not because we have earned the rest but because we need it.

Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10

Not to be productive. Not to be impressive. Not to be healed by next week. Just to be still.

There is a kind of restoration that only happens when we stop performing. When we let the ocean be loud so we can be quiet. When we sit and simply breathe. When we let God be God and release ourselves from the exhausting work of trying to be everything else.

He is still leading us to still waters. We only need to follow.

“He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.” Psalm 23:2-3

Lord, thank You for the quiet places You prepare for us – the ones we almost miss because we are too busy performing to notice Your invitation. Lead us to stillness today. Remind us that Your presence requires nothing from us but our surrender. Teach us to be still and in that stillness, to know You more. Amen.

Friend, has God been pointing you toward a little place of rest? We would love to hear about it in the comments. Pull up a chair – the porch is always open. 🌿

04/08/2026
Holy Thursday Reflections: The Table of Grace

A Holy Thursday Reflection

Luke 22:19 — “This is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

He knew.

That is the thing we cannot get past when we sit with Holy Thursday. Jesus knew what was coming. He knew who would betray Him, who would deny Him, who would scatter into the dark. He knew about the garden, the soldiers, the cross.

And He set the table anyway.

He gathered them, all of them, including the ones who would fail Him before sunrise and He broke bread. He poured the cup. He looked around that ordinary room at twelve ordinary men and said this is my body, given for you.

Not given for the faithful. Not given for the ones who would stay. Given for the ones in that room, which means given for all of us, in all of our weakness, in all of our wandering.

He set the table for the ones who would break His heart.

And He called it a gift.

What the Bread Means

There is something about bread that is already broken before it reaches you.

Wheat is cut down. Ground. Pressed. Passed through fire. By the time it arrives at the table it has already endured everything that was required of it to become what it is.

Jesus took that bread, already broken in the making and said this is me. This is what love looks like when it goes all the way. Not held together and pristine and protected. Broken open. Given away. Enough for everyone at the table.

We receive it with empty hands. That is the only posture available to us at this table. We cannot earn a seat here. We cannot bring something worthy of exchange. We simply come with open hands and receive what He has already broken for us.

What the Cup Means

The cup is harder.

In Gethsemane, just hours after this supper, Jesus would ask if the cup could pass from Him. He knew what was in it. The full weight of every sin, every sorrow, every broken thing in every broken life.

And yet at the table, before the garden, before the soldiers, He lifted it and said this is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many.

He offered the cup before He drank it Himself.

That is the kind of love we are dealing with here. A love that looks ahead at everything it will cost and still says take this, drink, this is for you.

We have not fully sat with this. We receive it too quickly, too casually, too familiar with the words to feel the weight of them anymore.

Poured out for you.

For you, specifically. Not for humanity in the abstract. For you – with your name, your history, your particular collection of failures and fears and quiet shames. He knew all of it when He lifted that cup.

He lifted it anyway.

The Table Is Still Set

Holy Thursday reminds us that we worship a God who initiates. Who gathers. Who prepares a place and invites us to come.

We did not find our way to this table. We were called to it.

And the invitation stands, not because we have made ourselves worthy, but because He has made us welcome. The bread is broken. The cup is poured. The table is set in the middle of the most sorrowful week in human history, and somehow it is the most tender thing we have ever seen.

Come to the table.

Come with empty hands and a full awareness of your need. Come remembering what it cost. Come slowly enough this Thursday to actually taste the gift that is being placed in your hands.

He set this table for you.

Lord, on this Holy Thursday we come to Your table aware of how unworthy we are to sit here and aware that You set it anyway. Thank You for bread that was broken so we could be made whole. Thank You for a cup poured out so we would never be empty again. Slow us down tonight. Keep us from receiving Your gift too quickly, too casually, too without wonder. We remember You. We remember what this cost. And we are grateful beyond what words can hold. Amen.

04/02/2026
The Magnifying Glass

1 Thessalonians 5:18 “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

There is something both earnest and a little comical about a person holding a magnifying glass – leaning in, squinting, searching with great intention for the thing they cannot seem to find.

We have all been that person.

We hold our longing up to the light and look for the big answer, the unmistakable sign, the breakthrough that will finally feel like enough. We scan the horizon for the extraordinary. We wait for the moment that is clearly, undeniably, worth being grateful for.

And in the searching, we miss what is already there.

The magnifying glass is pressed so close to the surface that we cannot see what lies directly beneath it.

The Ordinary That We Pass Over

Gratitude, we tend to believe, is something that arrives with the spectacular. We will be thankful when the situation changes, when the prayer is answered in the way we imagined, when the season finally turns. We hold our thanks in reserve, as though it were a reward we grant to God once He has met the threshold.

But 1 Thessalonians 5:18 does not say give thanks for the circumstances. It says in them. In the waiting. In the ordinary Tuesday. In the cup of coffee that is still warm. In the breath we drew without thinking about it. In the quiet that asked nothing of us this morning.

The instruction is tucked between two others – rejoice always and pray continually as though Paul understood that these three belong together. That joy, prayer, and gratitude are not separate practices but a single posture. A way of moving through the day with our eyes open.

What the Lens Reveals

A magnifying glass does not create what it shows. It only enlarges what was already there.

This is what a grateful heart does. It does not manufacture blessings out of nothing. It simply trains our attention on what we have been too distracted, too discouraged, or too hurried to notice.

The ordinary becomes luminous under that kind of looking.

The friendship that has held steady. The body that carried us through another week. The verse that met us exactly where we were. The door that opened quietly, without fanfare, that we nearly walked past without acknowledging.

We were searching for something bigger. And there it was.

In All Circumstances

These three words do not erase the hard ones. They do not ask us to pretend that the difficult season is easy, or that the ache is not real. Gratitude in all circumstances is not the same as gratitude for all circumstances.

It is, rather, the practice of refusing to let the hardness have the only word.

It is the decision to hold the magnifying glass over what remains rather than only over what is missing. To look again. To look more slowly. To trust that the ordinary, examined with intention, holds more grace than we initially gave it credit for.

Paul wrote these words from prison. Which means he knew something we need to hear: gratitude is not a luxury available only in comfortable seasons. It is a discipline available in all of them.

We do not have to wait for the extraordinary to begin giving thanks.

The blessing we have been searching for may already be here – quiet, patient, waiting to be seen. Not hidden from us, but simply small enough that we looked past it in our searching for something larger.

Set the magnifying glass down for a moment. Look at what is already beneath it.

This is the day the Lord has made. This ordinary, unremarkable, grace-filled day.

It was worth noticing all along.

Lord, forgive us for the blessings we have walked past without pausing. Forgive us for holding our gratitude in reserve, as though You had not already given us more than we have taken time to see. Quiet our searching long enough for us to notice what is already here. Teach us to give thanks not only when the answer comes in the way we hoped, but in the waiting, in the ordinary, in the small and unhurried gift of this very moment. In all circumstances, Lord. Even these. Amen.

Friend, what ordinary blessing have you been walking past lately? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

03/23/2026
Understanding the Spiritual Battle in Our Time

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood,

but against the rulers, against the authorities,

against the cosmic powers over this present darkness,

against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

— Ephesians 6:12 (ESV)

Paul’s Letter and the World It Entered

When Paul wrote these words, he was not sitting in a quiet study. He was in chains. A prisoner of the Roman Empire, writing to a church in Ephesus which was one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world. Ephesus was Rome’s showcase: military might, imperial cult worship, and a temple to Artemis that drew pilgrims from across the known world. Power was on full display there, and it was unmistakably human.

The believers in Ephesus knew what earthly power looked like. They had watched Rome crush opposition. They had seen the strong devour the weak. They understood as we do today that nations rise and fall on the strength of armies, economies, and alliances.

And yet Paul, from his prison cell, looked at all of it and said: that is not the real battle.

The Greek word he used – pale – described hand-to-hand combat. Close. Intimate. Personal. The fight Paul was naming was not distant or abstract. It was the kind of struggle where you feel the grip of the enemy. Where you can lose ground. Where the stakes are life and death.

The “rulers” and “authorities” Paul named were familiar terms in the ancient world used for both human power structures and the spiritual forces believed to stand behind them. His point was not to dismiss human responsibility, but to name something deeper: that behind every conflict between nations, behind every act of aggression and every breakdown of peace, there is a spiritual dimension we cannot see with our eyes.

When the World Feels Like It’s Unraveling

We live in days that feel eerily familiar to Paul’s. The news is full of nations taking unilateral action. International frameworks built after the bloodshed of two World Wars are being strained. The moral logic that once held aggression accountable is being questioned or simply ignored.

We watch. We scroll. We argue. We despair.

And we forget, sometimes, what Paul never forgot from his prison cell: the human leaders making these decisions are not the final arbiters of history. The nations rattling their weapons are not the last word. There is a battle happening at a level that no news cycle will cover.

This is not a call to indifference. Paul was not indifferent. He wept over cities. He prayed for kings. He engaged the ideas of his day with rigor and courage. Ephesians 6:12 is not a reason to disengage from the world. It is the reason we do not lose ourselves in despair over it.

The Porch Perspective

We come to the porch to slow down. To breathe. To remember what is true before we rush back into the noise.

And here is what is true: we do not have to choose between caring deeply about the world and trusting God’s sovereignty over it. We can grieve the unraveling of international order and still know that no earthly order was ever the source of our peace. We can mourn the lives lost in conflicts we didn’t start and still know that the Prince of Peace is not surprised.

We can pray for the people in power not because we admire them, but because Paul told us to. We can pray for the nations not because we believe a treaty will save us, but because God loves the nations.

The real war is being fought in the unseen places. And the weapons of that war are not missiles or mandates.

They are prayer. Truth. Righteousness. Faith. The Word of God.

Lord,

We confess that the news frightens us. We confess that we sometimes look at the people in power and wonder if anyone is steering the ship. We see the old guardrails weakening. We see nations testing each other’s resolve. And we feel small.

Remind us of Paul in his chains, writing with more freedom than any emperor ever had because he knew who held history.

Remind us that the battle is real, but it is not ours to win in our own strength. Give us eyes to see what is invisible. Give us the courage to fight the right enemy not each other, not the people whose politics infuriate us, not the nations we fear.

The darkness is not having the last word. You are.

Amen.

03/11/2026