The Prayer Porch

Tag: Encouragement

  • Lessons in The Changing Seasons

    There is a morning every year when I step outside and something has shifted. Nothing dramatic. Just a coolness in the air that wasn’t there the day before, a certain slant of light through the kitchen window. Summer doesn’t end with an announcement. It simply loosens its grip, quietly, while we’re busy with something else, and one day we look up and realize we’re already somewhere new.

    I have started to notice how much my own life follows the same pattern. The seasons of a life don’t usually end with a clear before and after either. A friendship fades so slowly you can’t name the day it changed. A stage of parenting closes without fanfare, and suddenly you’re in a different one. A dream you held for years quietly becomes something you used to want. We keep waiting for life to announce its transitions the way a calendar does, and it almost never obliges.

    For a long time, that unpredictability unsettled me. I wanted seasons, in my life and in my faith, to behave the way the calendar promises they will. Steady. Predictable. Arriving right on schedule. But that isn’t how growth works, and it isn’t really how the seasons work either, not exactly. Some years autumn lingers and some years winter arrives early and stays too long. The natural world doesn’t move in perfect uniformity, and neither do we.

    Scripture doesn’t shy away from this truth. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Notice it doesn’t say every season will be welcome, or that we’ll get advance notice. It simply says there is a time, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what was planted. A time to keep, and a time to cast away. Both halves of every pair matter. We tend to want the planting without the plucking up, the keeping without ever the casting away. But a life lived only in one season isn’t actually a life, it’s a stall.

    What I find myself needing most in seasons of change isn’t more control over the timing. It’s trust in the One who set the seasons in motion to begin with. The tree losing its leaves in October has no say over when spring will come, and yet it doesn’t panic. It rests. It trusts something it cannot see or rush, that has been faithful every year before this one.

    “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Not beautiful despite the changing, but beautiful because change is woven into the whole design. The winter isn’t a mistake in the story. It’s part of how the story keeps unfolding.

    I think of the seasons of my own life this way now, the ones behind me and the ones I can feel approaching, even if I can’t name them yet. A job that shaped me for years and then didn’t fit anymore. Relationships that were exactly right for a season and then quietly became something else. Even this blog, this porch, is a season I didn’t see coming a few years ago. None of it happened on a schedule I chose. All of it, looking back, happened in its time.

    So today I’m trying to hold my own life the way I try to hold the calendar, loosely, honestly, and with the trust that whatever season I’m standing in right now is not a wrong turn. It’s simply where I am. And there is another season coming after this one, the way there always is.

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, thank You for setting the seasons in motion, both the ones outside my window and the ones inside my own life. When change comes quietly, without warning or explanation, help me trust that You are still writing the story. Give me the grace to let go of what a season has finished teaching me, and the patience to wait for what comes next without rushing it. Remind me that You have made everything beautiful in its time, even the seasons I wouldn’t have chosen. Amen.

  • Finding Joy in Ordinary Moments

    Finding Joy in Ordinary Moments

    A reflection on friendship, small moments, and the gift of showing up

    I did not plan on finding encyclopedias on the side of the road today.

    I did not plan on stopping to investigate them, or deciding they were absolutely worth carrying home. I did not plan on the small Coke from McDonald’s that somehow tasted like the best thing I had ever had on a warm summer afternoon.

    But that is the thing about the best moments. They rarely show up on a calendar.

    They show up on a walk.

    A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter; he who finds one finds a treasure. — Sirach 6:14

    I walked with one of my dearest friends, my neighborhood bestie, the kind of friend who will stop mid-stride to peer at a pile of discarded books on the side of the road and say yes, absolutely, we are taking those home. The kind of friend who makes an ordinary Tuesday feel like a gift you did not know you needed.

    We did not solve any great problems today. We did not have a deep theological discussion or cross anything important off our lists. We walked, we laughed, we found encyclopedias, actual encyclopedias, the kind that used to live in living rooms and hold all the world’s knowledge before the internet arrived and made them beautifully obsolete, and we carried them home like they were treasure.

    And honestly? They kind of were.

    I have been thinking about what makes a friendship truly sturdy.

    It is not the grand gestures. It is not the perfectly planned dinner or the thoughtful gift or the long phone call where everything important gets said. Those things matter but they are not what holds a friendship together over the long haul.

    What holds it together is showing up on an ordinary afternoon for an ordinary walk and being fully present for whatever happens next. It is the willingness to be surprised together. To laugh at nothing in particular. To share a small Coke and call it enough.

    That is the sturdy shelter Sirach is talking about. Not a fortress. Not something dramatic or impressive. Just someone who shows up consistently, warmly, without an agenda, and makes the ordinary day a little more alive.

    God knew what He was doing when He placed the right people in our neighborhoods, our pews, our everyday paths. These are not accidental friendships. They are provisions. Small, faithful shelters He has placed along the road of our lives for exactly the moments when we need them most.

    Even the moments we did not know we needed.

    Even the Tuesday afternoon moments with encyclopedias and a small Coke and nowhere important to be.

    Especially those.

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord thank You for the friends who show up on ordinary days and make them extraordinary. Thank You for the unplanned moments, the side of the road surprises, and the simple shared joy of a walk with someone who knows us well. Help us never to be too busy or too distracted to notice the treasure You have placed right next door. May we be for others the sturdy shelter that a faithful friend is called to be. Amen.

    Friend, who is your sturdy shelter? Who is the person in your life who shows up on ordinary Tuesdays and makes them feel like grace? Take a moment today to thank God for them and maybe even send them a message to let them know.

  • Saint Clare of Assisi: A Lesson in Simplicity and Freedom

    A reflection on Saint Clare of Assisi — Feast Day, August 11

    There is something quietly radical about a woman who had everything and chose nothing.

    Saint Clare of Assisi was born into wealth, privilege, and a future already mapped out for her. A good marriage and a comfortable life. The kind of security that most people spend their entire lives chasing. And at eighteen years old, having heard Francis of Assisi preach, she walked away from all of it.

    Not reluctantly. Not halfway. Completely.

    She cut her hair, exchanged her fine clothes for a simple habit, and founded a community of women who would become known as the Poor Ladies – what we now call the Poor Clares. And for the rest of her life, Clare fought fiercely for one thing that might seem strange to fight for.

    The right to own nothing.

    In a world that measures worth by what we accumulate, Clare understood something that most of us spend a lifetime trying to learn. That the less we cling to, the more room there is for God. That poverty is not deprivation but a liberation. That when we release our grip on things, on comfort, on security, on the carefully constructed life we have built for ourselves, something extraordinary happens.

    We become free enough to be filled with light.

    For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. — 2 Corinthians 4:6

    Her very name means light. And Clare lived it not as a poetic metaphor but as a daily, costly, joyful choice. She chose simplicity when complexity was available. She chose poverty when wealth was within reach. She chose the hidden life of prayer and community when the world would have given her so much more to hold onto.

    And in that choosing, she shone.

    There is something about Clare’s story that speaks directly into our own lives, perhaps more than we might expect.

    Because most of us are not being asked to give away our possessions and enter a convent. But we are being asked, in our own quiet ways, to loosen our grip. On the outcome we cannot control. On the relationship we cannot fix. On the version of our life we had planned that is slowly becoming something different than we imagined.

    Clare’s poverty was external. Ours is often internal. It is the poverty of releasing our need to have all the answers. The poverty of trusting God with the things we most want to hold onto. The poverty of showing up – simply, honestly, without performance and letting that be enough.

    And it is in that simplicity, that release, that the light gets in.

    Clare spent the last years of her life too ill to leave her bed. She could not attend Mass. And yet those who visited her described her as radiant and filled with a joy that had no earthly explanation. Because she had spent decades practicing the art of letting go, she had nothing left to lose and nothing left to fear.

    Only light.

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, teach us the poverty of Clare. Teach us to hold things loosely, to release what we have been clutching too tightly, and to trust that in the empty space You will shine. Let the light You have placed in our hearts not be dimmed by the weight of what we carry. Make us simple. Make us free. Make us, in our own small way, reflections of the light that has no end. Amen.

    Today the Church celebrates Saint Clare of Assisi, virgin and founder of the Order of Poor Ladies. Her feast day is August 11. If her story moves you, I encourage you to sit with 2 Corinthians 4:6 today and ask yourself – what might God be asking you to release so His light can shine more freely through you?

  • While We Wait

    There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in when we are waiting.

    Not the peaceful quiet of a finished thing. Not the easy stillness of a Sunday morning with nowhere to be. This is a different kind of quiet. The kind that hums with uncertainty, with unanswered prayers, with doors not yet opened and words not yet spoken.

    Most of us know this quiet well.

    We wait for news that has not come. We wait for healing that is taking longer than we hoped. We wait for clarity in a season that still feels murky. We wait for the next chapter to begin while the current one seems to be holding its breath.

    And in that waiting, if we are honest, we can start to wonder.

    Is anyone listening? Is anything moving? Does any of this matter?

    Wait for the Lord. Be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. — Psalm 27:14

    Notice what the psalmist does not say. He does not say wait and worry. He does not say wait and figure it out yourself. He does not say wait until you understand why.

    He says wait and be strong. Take heart.

    As if the waiting itself is not passive at all. As if waiting on God is one of the most active, courageous things a person can do. As if showing up every morning and choosing to trust what you cannot yet see requires a kind of quiet bravery that the world rarely notices but heaven always does.

    You are not forgotten in your waiting.

    The silence is not absence. The stillness is not indifference. God is not slow. He is purposeful and what He is building in the in-between, in the not yet, in the space between the prayer and the answer. That work is real, even when you cannot see it.

    So today, friend, take heart. Hold on and keep showing up. Keep praying. Keep trusting that the one who called you to this season has not lost track of where you are.

    He is worth waiting for.

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, teach us the grace of waiting well. When the quiet feels heavy and the answers feel far, remind us that You are near. Strengthen our hearts for the in-between. Let our waiting not be wasted but woven into something we cannot yet see. We choose to trust You today not because the path is clear, but because You are faithful. We wait for You. Amen.

    Friend, what are you waiting for today? You do not have to carry it alone. The porch is always open. 🌿

  • They Did Not Look Away


    A reflection on the Holy Maccabees — Feast Day, August 1

    There is a story tucked inside the Old Testament that most people have never heard.

    It does not involve a parting sea or a burning bush. There are no angels announcing good news. There is only a mother and her seven sons, a ruthless king, and a choice that could not be undone.

    In the second century before Christ, King Antiochus IV Epiphanes set out to do what tyrants always attempt. He wanted to erase people by erasing their faith. He demanded that the Jewish people abandon their law, their God, their very identity. To prove his power, he brought a mother and her seven sons before him and gave them a simple command.

    Compromise. Just this once. Just enough to survive.

    They refused.

    One by one, in the presence of each other and their mother, the brothers were martyred for their faithfulness. And this mother, whose name history did not even record, watched every one of her sons die rather than betray the God they loved. Then she too went to her death.

    “I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again.” — 2 Maccabees 7:22-23

    She did not look away. Not once.

    I have been sitting with this story all week.

    Because we do not face King Antiochus. We will not be dragged before a throne and asked to renounce our faith under threat of death.

    But we do face something.

    We face the quiet, persistent pressure to soften what we believe. To keep our faith tucked politely out of sight. To compromise just enough to avoid the discomfort of standing apart. To stay silent when something in us knows we should speak. To drift, slowly and almost imperceptibly, away from the things we said we would never leave.

    The pressure on us is not a sword. It is subtler than that. It comes in the form of exhaustion, of loneliness, of wondering if it is even worth it anymore. It comes when we have prayed the same prayer for years with no visible answer. It comes when the world looks at what we believe and shakes its head.

    And in those moments, the Maccabees have something to say to us.

    They were not superhuman. They were not without fear. They were a family. Brothers who loved each other, a mother who had nursed each of them, held each of them, known each of them by name. And they chose faithfulness anyway. Not because it was easy. Because it was true.

    What does modern day courage look like?

    It looks like choosing prayer when cynicism would be easier.

    It looks like holding your convictions quietly but firmly when the room disagrees.

    It looks like the mother who keeps showing up for her children’s faith even when her own heart is breaking.

    It looks like returning to God after a season of drifting, not with shame, but with the simple honesty of someone who knows where home is.

    It looks like you, sitting with this reflection on an ordinary weekend in August, choosing to tend the fire of your faith instead of letting it go out.

    The Maccabees did not have a guarantee that their sacrifice would matter. They had something better. They had the unshakeable conviction that this life is not the whole story, that the God who created them could and would restore them.

    That conviction held them.

    It can hold us too.

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, give us the courage of a mother who did not look away. Give us the steadiness of brothers who held each other in the hardest moment. When the world asks us to compromise what we know to be true, remind us of those who have gone before us, who chose You when everything else said not to. May our faith be that sturdy. May our love for You be that deep. Amen.

    The feast of the Holy Maccabees falls on August 1. Their story is found in 2 Maccabees 7. If you have never read it, I encourage you to do so this weekend, slowly, and with a full heart 🌿

  • The Practice of Waiting with Purpose

    There is something quietly countercultural about committing to the same prayer, the same intention, nine days in a row.

    No instant answer or shortcut. Just showing up morning after morning, candle lit or coffee in hand and laying the same thing before God again.

    This is a novena.

    The word comes from the Latin novem – nine. Rooted in the nine days the disciples spent in the upper room between the Ascension and Pentecost, waiting, praying, not knowing exactly what was coming but trusting it would come. Nine days of holy uncertainty. Nine days of intentional presence.

    For centuries, Catholics have prayed novenas, the nine consecutive days of focused prayer for a specific intention. A feast day approaching on the calendar. The practice is ancient, simple, and surprisingly powerful.

    But here is what I want you to consider. Whatever your faith tradition, whatever your background:

    What would change in your life if you devoted nine days of focused, intentional thought and prayer to one thing?

    Not scattered worry or anxious scrolling with a half-hearted hoping.

    Nine days with one intention just showing up every single day.

    There is something about repetition that does something to us. It moves a thing from the surface of our minds down into the deeper places, the places where real transformation happens. Whether you are Catholic or Protestant, spiritual but not religious, or simply someone who believes that focused intention matters, the rhythm of a novena speaks to something universal in the human soul.

    We were made to practice and we were made to return. We were made to wait with purpose rather than drift with anxiety.

    This week I am in the middle of one myself. Nine days of intentions laid quietly before God, ending on a day that holds deep personal meaning. I cannot tell you yet what He will do with them. But I can tell you that the act of returning to the same prayer, day after day, has already done something in me.

    It has made me pay attention.

    And sometimes, that is the whole point.

    What intention have you been carrying that deserves nine days of your full, undivided focus?

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, teach us to wait well. Teach us to return – not because we have not been heard, but because the practice of returning forms us into people who trust You more deeply. May our intentions find their rest in Your hands, and may these nine days of prayer open us to whatever You have been waiting to give us. Amen.

    Friend, have you ever prayed a novena or practiced intentional focused prayer over several days? We would love to hear about it in the comments. The porch is always open. 🌿

  • Carrying Faith Like a Scapular in Daily Life

    Carrying Faith Like a Scapular in Daily Life

    Today is the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and I keep thinking about the scapular. Not the theology of it exactly, but the simple, practical image behind it. A small piece of cloth worn close to the body, a quiet reminder tucked under everyday clothes that someone is watching over you.

    That feels like exactly what most of our days are made of. We rarely get the dramatic, obvious moments of faith. We get laundry and errands and long drives and difficult phone calls. We get the ordinary weight of just getting through a day. Our Lady of Mount Carmel does not ask us to leave that ordinary life behind. She asks us to wear our faith into it, quietly, close to the skin, the way the scapular works. Not a performance for anyone else to see. Just something we carry with us into whatever the day holds.

    I think about the Carmelite hermits who first climbed that mountain looking for God in silence and simplicity, and I think about how far that is from most of our lives today. We are loud, busy, distracted, and pulled in a dozen directions before breakfast is even finished. But Mary meets us there too. She does not require a mountain or a monastery. She meets mothers folding towels, coaches on their tenth phone call of the day, and anyone standing in a kitchen wondering if any of it matters.

    It does matter. The scapular is a promise that Mary walks with us through the small, unremarkable moments, not just the big ones. Maybe today is a good day to notice where God has been quietly present in your own routine, the parts of your day you might normally rush past without a second thought.

    Our Lady of Mount Carmel, help us carry our faith into the ordinary corners of our day. Remind us that You are near even in the smallest, most unnoticed moments, and help us slow down enough to notice Your presence there.

    Where do you feel God’s presence most in your ordinary, everyday routine?

  • The Long Way Home

    “How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty. My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.” Psalm 84:1-2

    Some journeys don’t look like journeys at all.

    They look like a Sunday morning in a pew you know by heart. The words in a language you can’t fully understand that settle in your chest not needing translation. The feeling of reaching for a prayer book you’ve carried for years and finding it still fits perfectly in your hands.

    They look like coming home.

    I left the faith tradition that formed me, shaped me, and wrote itself into the deepest places of my soul. I went searching not because I stopped believing, but because something in me was restless. And I found real things along the way. Genuine community. Pastoral warmth. A fresh expression of what it means to love God with your whole life.

    But the soul is honest when we get quiet enough to listen.

    I kept returning to the Office of Divine Prayer. The ancient rhythms of morning and evening praise that the Church has prayed for centuries. I felt something move in me at Mass. The readings at the Liturgy, the moment of the Eucharist, that I could not find anywhere else. Not because God was absent elsewhere but because this is where He has always met me most completely.

    The Eucharist is not a small thing. Not for me. It never was.

    For those of us formed in the Catholic tradition, the Eucharist is the source and the summit. The Eucharist is the Real Presence of Christ given freely, received humbly, transforming us from the inside out. In the Eucharist, we recognize Jesus, the way you recognize the face of someone you have always loved. It is not nostalgia, not habit. It is my soul knowing what it knows.

    I remember one phrase clearly enough to write down – Jezus uczynił wszystko z litości. Jesus did everything out of compassion. And something in me broke open quietly in the best possible way.

    God has been patient with my wandering. He did not shame me for the long way around. He simply kept setting a table and waiting.

    Being called back to an old Polish parish that was built by immigrant hands and immigrant faith, worn smooth by generations of knees on kneelers and fingers on rosary beads. I don’t know everything that this means yet I am finding my footing.

    This is not a post about what I left behind. God does not waste our wandering. Every step of the road was held in His hands.

    This is a post about listening. About what happens when we get honest with ourselves in prayer and stop arguing with what the soul already knows. About the particular mercy of a God who lets us take the long way home. He meets us at the door without a word of reproach.

    If you are somewhere in the middle of your own long road today, sitting with restlessness or regret or the quiet ache of something unresolved – may I offer you this?

    The longing itself is holy. The yearning is not failure. It is your soul being faithful to what it knows is true. The path back may not be a straight line.

    He is not finished with you nor is he disappointed in you. He is simply waiting with a table set and a door open. With all the patience of a God who invented time and is not subject to it.

    Come home at whatever pace you need to. He will be there.

    Lord, thank You for the long way around. Thank You for every season, every community, every moment of genuine grace along the road. Thank You that You do not shame our wandering but simply wait with open arms. Lead us home to where You have always known we belong. Give us the courage to walk through the door. Amen.

    Have you ever taken the long way home in your faith and found that God was waiting there when you arrived? I would love to hear your story in the comments.

  • 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.

  • Faith and Freedom: Lessons from Juneteenth

    It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
    Galatians 5:1

    There is a particular kind of freedom that arrives late.

    Not the freedom declared on paper, not the freedom proclaimed from a distance, but the freedom that finally reaches the people it was always meant for. The freedom that travels the last mile on foot, through heat and uncertainty, carried by a messenger on horseback into Galveston, Texas on the nineteenth of June, 1865. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had already been signed. Two and a half years of people living in chains that had already, legally, been broken.

    Today is Juneteenth and we are sitting with that.

    We are sitting with the distance between declaration and delivery. Between the word spoken and the word received. Between freedom announced and freedom actually lived.

    I find myself, as I so often do on this Porch, turning that truth over slowly in the light of faith. It seems to me that this tension lives not only in history but in the deepest places of the human soul.

    The Long Distance Between Promise and Arrival

    How many of us know something of this gap between what we have been told is true and what we have actually been able to live into?

    We have been told we are free. Free from shame, from the past, from the weight of every sin and sorrow that once defined us. The declaration has been made. The price has been paid. The Word has gone out.

    And yet, some mornings we wake up still wearing chains that have already been broken. We carry grief we have been told to release. We rehearse failures that have already been forgiven. We live in the long two and a half years between the proclamation and the messenger arriving at our door.

    The people of Galveston on June 19th, 1865 did not receive new freedom that day. Rather, they received the news of a freedom that had been theirs all along, a freedom that the structures around them had conspired to withhold, to delay, to deny. The sin was not in the slowness of the messenger. The sin lived in the system that refused to carry the news, that benefited from the silence, that kept people bound in a bondage that had already been declared over.

    We would do well to sit with that today and not look away too quickly.

    What Juneteenth Asks of Those Who Follow Jesus

    There is no honest way to follow Christ and remain indifferent to the freedom of other people. The Jesus of the Gospels moved toward the bound, the marginalized, the ones whose dignity had been stripped by systems and structures and the silence of those who should have known better. He taught from borrowed boats in front of crowds that the powerful ignored. He touched the untouchable. Moreover, He said the Spirit of the Lord had anointed Him to proclaim freedom for the prisoners.

    Juneteenth is a day that asks us plainly: are we the ones carrying the news, or the ones who benefit from its delay?

    That is not a comfortable question and it was never meant to be. The Porch has always been a place for honest reflection rather than comfortable religion, and today of all days calls us to something more than a surface celebration.

    We can celebrate, and we should. The joy of Juneteenth is real and sacred and worth every note of it. All of it is holy. Resilience dressed in celebration is one of the most beautiful things human beings do.

    Even so, celebration without reflection is incomplete. Joy without justice is fragile. For those of us whose faith calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves, Juneteenth is also an invitation to ask hard questions about what freedom means, who still waits for it, and what we are willing to do to carry the news the rest of the way.

    The Freedom That Is Already Yours

    Perhaps you are reading this from your own version of the long two and a half years.

    Perhaps your freedom has been declared but not yet felt. Perhaps you know in your head that you are forgiven, released, redeemed, but your heart is still standing in the field, waiting for the messenger, not quite believing the war is over.

    Hear this today: the proclamation has already been made. The price has already been paid. You are not waiting for God to decide to free you. What you are waiting for is to receive news that is already true.

    That receiving is sometimes the hardest work of faith. It requires us to let go of an identity built around bondage, and that is frightening even when the bondage is painful, because at least it is familiar. Freedom asks us to become someone we have not yet learned to be.

    Even so, the Spirit of God does not grow impatient with the slow walk toward liberation. He rides the long distance. He finds us in Galveston. He speaks into the fields and the quiet rooms where we have been living as though the proclamation never came.

    You are free. You have always been free. Come and live like it.

    On This Juneteenth

    Let us celebrate the freedom that finally arrived on June 19th, 1865 and honor the people whose resilience carried them through the years it took to get there.

    Let us grieve honestly the freedoms still delayed, still denied, still traveling the last mile in a world that does not always want to carry the news.

    Let us also examine our own hearts for the places where we benefit from silence, from delay, from looking away from what is right in front of us.

    And finally, let us receive, perhaps for the first time or the hundredth time, the freedom that Christ has already declared over every life, including ours.

    Stand firm in it. Put the chains down. The war is over.

    Lord, on this Juneteenth we remember. We remember those who waited in bondage for news that should have reached them sooner. We honor their endurance and their joy. Forgive us for the ways we have been slow to carry freedom to others, in our communities, in our relationships, and in our own hearts. Lead us to live as truly free people, and to spend that freedom not on ourselves alone but on the liberation of every soul still waiting in the long gap between declaration and arrival. Amen.

    Where in your own life are you living in the gap between what God has declared and what you have actually received? And what would it look like today to finally let the news arrive? I would love to hear your reflection in the comments.