Sep 08 2026
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The Christian Life

Lord, Teach Us to Pray – Lead Us Not Into Temptation

White child safety gate secured across a wooden staircase

 “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” – Matthew 6:13 – RSV

I recently spoke to a father whose child had burnt their hands on a hot grill during a cookout. It all happened so fast that this poor dad couldn’t react quickly enough to stop his little one from rushing up and touching the hot grates. Thankfully the burns were mild and healed quickly. No permanent damage done, but a painful lesson for his child to learn. As parents, I think we all have at least one close-call moment like this with our kids when they’re young. I can still vividly recall the morning when I’d neglected to close the gate at the top of our basement stairs and while I was in the back bedroom, all of a sudden I heard the alarming “clunk clunk clunk” sound of my very fast-on-all-fours daughter tumbling down the stairs. Thankfully she too was okay, but it heightened my vigilance as a parent to always make sure that gate was shut from then on.

As parents we do our best to keep our kids from wandering into dangerous situations. It’s natural for them to want to explore the world around them and often they don’t know any better than to push boundaries when our guard is down. In the spiritual realm, we as God’s children can also be prone to push boundaries, exploring things that aren’t healthy for our faith. I believe that’s what Jesus is addressing in this verse of the Lord’s Prayer. God is always looking out for us and would never intentionally lead us into temptation to sin, but the free will He’s given us means we bear some responsibility to be vigilant for ourselves.

So what is Jesus telling us to pray for here? In a world that serves up a never-ending barrage of images, ideas, and appeals to our pleasure-seeking human nature, it seems the only true way to escape temptation is to live on top of a mountain somewhere in the Himalayas (although they might be working on better wi-fi there, too.) With these words, Jesus seems to be acknowledging our human need for God’s help if we’re to avoid the pitfalls all around us.

What does that help look like? I believe it comes in the form of a deeper awareness of how and when we’re being tempted. Just like internet scams have gotten more refined and harder to spot, so has temptation for the modern believer. This may very well be the most challenging time in history to try to faithfully follow Jesus. I’m not just talking about temptations that target our lust or greed or selfishness, although those are certainly alive and well today. The biggest temptation we need to avoid may be the temptation to give up trying to live a faithful life altogether. The “evil” we most need our Father to deliver us from is the evil that wears down our spirits in difficult times, telling us that it’s too hard to follow Christ, that it’s not worth the struggle, and that God’s not really there to see us through.

Now more than ever, we live in a world that erodes our patience. At the touch of a screen we expect instant answers, constant information, and nonstop entertainment. When we face difficult circumstances, we’re less prepared than ever to be willing to wait things out. God’s timing is always perfect, but it’s rarely quick. True faith involves holding on to His promises, sometimes far longer than we ever think we should have to. God won’t ever lead us into temptation, but he allows us to experience it to challenge and refine our faith, and to deepen our understanding of His working in our lives. When his deliverance from the current “evil” we’re struggling with doesn’t come right away, we need to pray all the more for Him to protect us from the temptation to abandon our trust in Him.

Even for me writing this blog, it’s tempting to question why I’m doing it sometimes. I gave up on it once but restarted it out of a sense of God’s calling. Each time I sit down to write, I view it as an act of faith. So for me the temptation to give up on it is something I need God’s help to guard against. I think God sometimes tests faithfulness by withholding any sense of the fruits of a labor, just to see if the laborer will still faithfully do the work. So whether I have five readers or five-thousand or five-hundred-thousand, I need to keep plugging away.

So as we dig deeper into Jesus’ closing words of his blueprint for prayer, we can sense Him urging us to ask the Father to help us be vigilant against the temptation to lose faith. If we keep our eyes on Him, He will certainly deliver us from the greatest of all evils, one that would rob us of a life lived trusting in Him for all that we need.

Lead us not into temptation – Father, protect me from all temptations, especially the temptation to give up hope, to lose faith, and to mistake your timing for indifference.

But deliver us from evil – Give me grace and strength to withstand all the challenges of this life, knowing that you can be fully trusted to provide everything I need. My strength, safety, and salvation is in You.

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Aug 31 2026
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The Christian Life

Lord, Teach Us to Pray – As We Forgive Our Debtors

Two people gently holding hands across a rustic wooden table

“And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors;” – Matthew 6:12 – RSV

When I was in high school, each year the final edition of the school newspaper had a section devoted to Senior Wills. Any graduating Senior could submit their “will” – usually a clever little blurb either offering something material or a bit of wisdom up to one or more underclassmen to help them through their remaining high school career. They made for a fun read and were generally well intended. My Junior year, I’d put my skinny, slow, 6′ 1″, 150 pound body into the meat grinder of varsity football. It was my first and only foray into organized tackle football, and in a fairly large and racially diverse Southern California high school, the results were entirely forgettable. They were not, however, entirely forgotten.

When the paper came out with that year’s Senior Wills, my attention (along with that of all my friends) was drawn to an entry that read: “We the Seniors of the Monrovia High School football team hereby will all our athletic ability to Rob Sheehy.” Ouch. Now, I may have had unrealistic expectations of my abilities. And for various reasons, my insecure, 16-year-old self didn’t always project the humility I should have. But still, it wasn’t a kind thing to do. Thankfully back then there was no internet. That meager dig in a high school newspaper pales in comparison to the cruel and often nonstop cyberbullying that goes on in today’s world. I recall in the moment kind of laughing it off but deep down, it burned. I never knew who submitted that and I didn’t bother trying to find out. Perhaps for that reason, it wasn’t long before I was able to make peace with it, forgive whoever did it, and move on.

Forgiveness. One could argue that no topic in any of Jesus’ teachings is more central, more essential. The very act of Jesus going to the cross to die for us is to secure our ultimate forgiveness from sin. It’s the culmination of His message of the Father’s grace and mercy to our broken world. We have had a debt forgiven that goes beyond our human capacity to measure it, and if we actually could, perhaps we’d spend all day, every day, doing nothing but thanking and praising God for that gift of mercy.

While the gift of the cross is free to all of us who will accept it, it does not come without responsibility. These words of Jesus in the Lord’s prayer hammer home one of His most challenging and most crucial messages: as we have been forgiven, so must we forgive others. In Matthew 18:21-35, the parable of the unforgiving servant paints a clear picture of what Jesus means with these words. A servant is forgiven by the king from a debt that would equate to millions of dollars in modern times. Shortly after, that same servant has a man thrown in jail over a debt of chump change by comparison. When the king hears of it, he immediately has the servant thrown in jail for the debt that he was originally forgiven.

The message is clear: as God has been merciful to us, so we are to be merciful to those who wrong us, no matter what the wrong was. This is challenging. SO challenging. We can be hurt so badly, often by those who we love the most or who love us the most, or at least claim to. We can live together with someone for years while the hurts pile up and pile up, and we become so overwhelmed by them that we just can’t take it anymore and move on from that person. We vow that we’ll never forgive them for the pain they’ve caused us. Even observing them from a distance over time, we see how the person still behaves and it reinforces our belief in their general badness, further justifying our unforgiving stance. But God calls us to a different path.

One of the books, maybe the book that started my journey towards seeing God as a loving, forgiving, graceful Father is William P. Young’s The Shack. In the story, the protagonist, Mack, is met by the beautiful and wonderful triune being of God, at a place where an unspeakable horror was committed. As the book unfolds, the persons of Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit lead him on a journey in which the ultimate goal is to find a way to forgive the person who committed the horrible act that has left Mack’s spirit scarred and broken. It’s a powerful and beautiful story, and the film does a wonderful job of bringing it to life. While some have criticized its theology and portrayal of God, I believe the message rings true. Painful as it is, and as much as we want to be justified in all our pain over whatever wrongs we’ve endured, we need to forgive.

Sometimes, the hardest “debtor” for us to forgive is ourselves. No one is more aware of our faults and the wrongs we’ve done to ourselves and others than the one staring back at us in the mirror. But we need to forgive ourselves also. The wrongs we suffer from others may cause us to hold a grudge, which has been likened to drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. But regret for the ways we’ve let ourselves down, along with the ways we’ve hurt others lays an even heavier burden on our shoulders. It’s a burden we’re not meant to carry. Certainly not part of the “cross” Jesus urges us to take up as we follow Him. But we’re so acutely aware of having hurt or disappointed someone that we never stop beating ourselves up for it. The other party may have long ago forgiven us, but somehow we can’t bring ourselves to accept it.

Even if the other party is God, we struggle to receive the mercy He so freely gives us. While it’s no bueno to accept His grace too casually and use the cross as an excuse to continue living in an obviously unrighteous manner, the opposite – failing to allow His grace and mercy to wash away our past, is equally self-destructive. In Psalm 103:12 the psalmist assures us our sins are removed from us as far as the East is from the West. What a liberating image that is! But failing to forgive ourselves when forgiveness has already been given denies us that freedom and keeps us locked up. Repentance is necessary, but it shouldn’t be perpetual.

If God’s Kingdom is to come and His will is to be done, it can only be done when His children are willing to be set free, not only from their own sin against others, and themselves, but from the sins of others against them. The first part was all Jesus on the cross. The second part is on us, with the help of the Spirit.

And forgive us our debts – Lord, thank you that you have indeed forgiven my debt, forever washing away my sin with the blood you shed on the cross.

As we also have forgiven our debtors – Holy Spirit, please help me show the same mercy to all those around me that you have shown me, including myself. Please let me not hold anything against my brothers and sisters. And let me not deny mercy to myself when I have already repented and received it from You and others. Help me let go of all hurts, that we may all share in the true joy of Your Kingdom.

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Aug 24 2026
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The Christian Life

Lord, Teach Us to Pray – Our Daily Bread

Fresh loaf of bread beside an open book and coffee on wooden table

“Give us this day our daily bread” – Matthew 6:11 – RSV

One cool thing my dad and I did on our ballpark road trip was read the Our Daily Bread devotional every morning. As we hit the road to our next stop, whoever wasn’t driving would read the day’s entry and the corresponding prayer that follows. It was a great way to set our minds on God, bringing us closer together as father and son, and as Father and sons. It’s a nice, tightly packaged bit of spiritual nourishment for the day.

I doubt Dad and I would have had as easy a time focusing on those devotionals were it not for travel plazas with Dunkin Donuts and a stash of Oreos and Chester’s puffcorn in the back seat. The “bread” in this line of the Lord’s Prayer can take many different forms, but physical food is always necessary. No doubt the disciples in Jesus’ day were focused on that when He first gave them these words. If you’re familiar with the book of Exodus you likely recall God providing the Israelites with heavenly bread – manna – on the ground each morning. And you may recall His clear instructions for them to only gather what they would need for that day. No storing it up or hoarding it. Any manna kept to the next day would immediately spoil and turn bitter, useless for anything. A very in-your-face reminder from God to trust in Him daily for their needs.

In our modern society, we likely think of “bread’ in more financial terms. Money is what we use to obtain our life needs, so our daily bread frames out more as a paycheck or income. Our modern compensation models start to disconnect us pretty quickly from God’s notion of daily bread, and I believe that makes this one of the more challenging lines of the Our Father. Most of us don’t get paid daily, while some of us aren’t getting paid at all. Financial stability and security seem to be the never-ending quest of our modern society. There’s a trillion-dollar industry filled with companies promising to help us plan for a secure and comfortable financial future. Heck, I used to work for one.

So “daily bread” is not really what most of us are looking for. If we’re being totally honest, we’re probably thinking more along the lines of “Give us this day our lifetime bread.” We’re not wired to deal with the notion of not having enough to last us past today, past this present moment and need. Yet I believe that’s exactly what God truly wants of us. Jesus is trying to point out, not just in this verse of the Our Father but many other places in His message, that total dependence on God is perhaps the very foundation of faithfulness.

Trusting in God for our daily bread takes faith to an entirely new, and incredibly uncomfortable level. But in doing so we learn that not only do we need to totally trust Him that what He provides us will always be enough. We also come to understand that there really is such a thing as too much. What would have happened if dad and I had read more than one day’s devotional at a time? Sure we’d have ingested more scripture and more insight, but would we have actually retained as much of it? Probably not. And doing so would have robbed our tomorrows of the joy of diving in fresh each day for a new portion. When we rely on God, our faith grows as we see Him work in exciting new ways to provide for us. Ways far beyond what we ever could have conceived on our own.

But on our own is how we so often want to be. We long for freedom, and we believe that to get there we just need independence, financial stability and security – always making sure we have enough. We chase the “American Dream”, working hard to save up for the life we want to someday be able to live, gambling our present days on a future that might not live up to our expectations. In doing so, we work harder than we have to and we gain less than we think we should have. We push ourselves harder than what God ever does, feeling way more exhausted, and seeing far less progress. Jesus challenges us with these words to shift our perspective from laboring to try to secure our uncertain futures to living each day as it comes, trusting God’s plan and seeking our security in His loving arms. The Christian life is not easy, yet traveling with Jesus means we’re never loaded beyond what we can carry.

What the Lord is calling us to with this verse is to understand that the true path to freedom is one of total dependence on Him: surrendering our desire for control, trading our own faulty, unreliable efforts to build a life of security, and letting go. Falling into the Father’s loving arms and trusting that He’s always going to catch us. He’s always going to feed us. That no matter what each day holds, as long as we have Him, we have enough.

Digging deep we realize how much this verse, along with the one that follows it, challenges us as believers. It gets to the essence of what it truly means to follow Jesus – to not only pray like Him but to live like Him.

Give us this day our daily bread – I’ve got to stop trying to fill my own storehouse and let go of trying to secure my own future. The Father’s always got me, his storehouse is always full, and I already have the key. I just need to ask and to trust.

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Aug 17 2026
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The Christian Life

Lord, Teach Us to Pray – Thy Will Be Done

Hiker walking along a wildflower-lined trail through alpine meadows

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.” – Matthew 6:10 – RSV

Take ten kindergartners outside with some paper and a box of crayons on a sunny day and ask them to draw the sky and you’ll certainly get ten very different pictures. So it is for us when we try to picture God’s Kingdom. From the cartoonish images of heaven as floating on clouds, to the beautiful coastline views on either side of the US, or the majestic mountains out west (my personal favorite) or the rolling, flower covered hills of the Italian countryside, we all have different views of what God’s Kingdom might look like. For some it might be a place of total relaxation, while for others it might mean exploring places beyond our wildest human imaginations. I know a few guys who probably envision endless rounds of golf on courses we’ll probably never get to play in this lifetime (morning round at Augusta followed up with a 4:30 tee time at Pebble Beach? Perfect!) One constant no matter how we picture Heaven is that it is perfect.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus gives many parables that begin with “The Kingdom of God is like…” Whether it’s a wedding banquet or interactions between a master and servants, or a father and his sons, He’s much more focused on what happens there than on the place itself. So in giving us the words “Thy Kingdom come,” I think Jesus is urging us to pray for God’s perfect vision of our relationship with Him, and our relationships with each other. While it’s natural for us to long for Heaven as a place of ultimate peace, joy, and comfort, we shouldn’t spend too much time focusing on that. Rather we should ask Our Father to bring us His Kingdom here in the form of both a closer walk with Him, and better relationships with those around us.

Another thing about God’s Kingdom – it’s a place where the Father’s will is always done, and done perfectly. Jesus teaches us to pray “Thy will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven.” Pondering those words, it seems that He’s urging us to a deeper desire for God’s perfect will to be carried out in our world and our daily lives. The Father has a perfect will for each one of us. Given our human faults and the free will that He gives us, none of us will ever live a life that follows His perfect will step for step. So while His will may not be done here exactly as it is in Heaven, we can still pray for our Father to guide our lives in a way that His perfect will for each of us can still be done in the end.

I struggle in the best of times to trust that God’s will is being done in my day-to-day. The aftermath of losing my job and the daily uncertainty that comes with it has put me on quite a roller coaster. I ride the “ups” believing that God has a purpose for this time of unemployment, leading me to a new calling and a deeper sense of life purpose. Then I careen toward the “downs” thinking that I’ve totally failed as a worker, a partner, a father. That every aspiration I have is just driven by some selfish need for attention or control. That I’ve wandered so far off base from what God intended for me that He’s just left me to twist in the wind, leaving me to my own devices and letting me wander the path of the prodigal until I come to my last end, finally waking up and surrendering myself back to Him.

In those moments, the words of a different prayer bring comfort. In The Living Spirit, Thomas Merton prays: “the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.”

I believe it’s this sentiment that Jesus leads us to with these first true requests we make of Our Father in this blueprint for prayer that He gives us. Hopefully we can see more clearly how we can better trust the Father to guide us on the path to doing His will here on earth, bringing His Kingdom more fully into our daily lives.

Thy Kingdom Come – While I long for the perfect joy and beauty of eternity, let me live my life as the good and faithful servant, the eager and willing wedding guest, the son who overcomes his shame to embrace his Father’s forgiveness and also forgives others.

Thy Will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven – As I take each step this day, help me trust You and surrender to You, to let Your will be done perfectly in my life, overcoming my human imperfections. Help me be the best version of who You made me to be, for the work You’ve given me to help Your Kingdom come.

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Aug 10 2026
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The Christian Life

Lord, Teach Us to Pray – Hallowed Be Thy Name

Open wooden door revealing a star-filled galaxy inside a stone room

“Pray then like this: Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.” – Matthew 6:9 RSV

In my own faith journey, being able to see God as a truly loving and personally present Father who is pleased with even my most feeble efforts to follow Him and live the life He has made me to live is a relatively recent development. Up until a few years ago, my prevailing image of God the Father was a bit more harsh. Like a detached Ward Cleaver, standing off in the distance shaking his head with a look of resigned disappointment on His face. Or less-than-jolly old Santa Claus making his list and checking it twice, with a “Naughty” column that seemed to be much fuller than the “Nice” one.

Indeed, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer can be hijacked to paint a picture of the Father cutting a towering figure in a distant realm of Heaven, impersonal and imposing. Growing up Catholic with fairly strict parents, Jesus’ kicking off His blueprint for prayer with these words is a bit problematic on the surface. But while I’m sure the Lord wanted the disciples, and us, to always carry the proper reverence toward the Father, I believe that if we look closer, He’s not so much painting a picture of the Father, but more of the attitude we should always seek to bring when we approach His throne. An attitude of praise. Far from trying to make God seem more distant and unknowable in these opening words, He reminds us that God deeply desires our worship and praise, not from some need for self-gratification or an ego boost, but because He wants us to always be mindful of how good He is and how much He loves us.

Our praise to the Father is a sweet aroma, a New Testament version of the sweet aroma of burnt offerings that His people would offer up in Old Testament times. It says “God, you give us all good things, and so we offer back to you the best we have of that goodness, praising and acknowledging Your perfect love and care for us as Your children.” Jesus teaches us to revere the Father for who He is – merciful, loving, kind, and always working for our good. Keeping that picture of our Father opens our hearts and minds to His name being truly worthy to be hallowed (holy) above all other names. His throne room doors are swung wide open and we can approach with joy and boldness knowing we’ve come to the right place, to the One who truly can and will handle every concern we bring before Him.

God’s name is holy. But what exactly is God’s name? In our Western culture, just capital G “God” seems to be the default. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it does seem to rob us of an opportunity to expand our thinking about who our Father really is. In Moses’ life-changing encounter with God in Exodus 3, He tells Moses that his name is “I AM.” My lack of formal Biblical scholarship notwithstanding, I believe what He’s telling Moses with this name is that beyond and above all time and space and matter, He exists. He’s not just a being. He’s The Being. And that makes His name something that’s far beyond a word, or a label, or even something that can or should be casually spoken at all.

I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but my mom was. During her studies I recall her talking about the unpronounceable name of God – something scholars call the Tetragrammaton – written as YHWH in Hebrew. (Of course, when you don’t use vowels, isn’t everything unpronounceable?) From that we get Yahweh and Jehovah (a Latin derivative) as names for the Almighty. The Israelites had many names for God: Yahweh, Jehovah (names that the Hebrews dared not speak) Elohim, and Adonai to name a few. Adonai seems to be the more favored name and if you’re a fan of The Chosen, that’s how they refer to the Father in the show. Whatever name God might have on his hypothetical drivers license though, Jesus wants us to always be mindful that Our Father and His name are to be kept sacred and holy.

Personally, I think any name we give God which strengthens our image and deepens our relationship with Him as a loving Father is likely pleasing and acceptable to Him. I once had a dream where God seemed to manifest as a big happy smiling Hawaiian man, like a big teddy bear Don Ho type of dude. It was early on in my journey toward a more loving fatherly image of God, and it really resonated with me. I looked up the Hawaiian word for “father” and discovered the term Makua kane. So now when I pray privately, I often use that term to help center my thoughts on a more loving, smiling, teddy bear of a heavenly Father than that 50s sitcom dad waiting to hear what trouble I got into today. (Sorry Ward, just grab your pipe and have a seat. Dinner will be ready in an hour.)

One other challenge I see from the generic capital G God name we tend to use is it can open a door to some judgmental and potentially misguided thinking. I recently had a conversation with someone who had said that they’d started watching a movie but turned it off after 20 minutes or so because of all the times that various characters used the phrase “god damn.” I get the thinking since we’re commanded in Exodus 20:7 not to take the Lord’s name in vain. But similar to the angst in some circles over profanity, I’m not sure we have a great handle on where, or if, we’re the ones who should be worried about drawing that line. There’s probably a whole separate post to be had around what it really means to do that and I’m not going to get into that here. I’m just going to keep an open mind to how we choose to address our Heavenly Father and trust that if we bring the right attitude, it’s all good.

Bottom line, whatever you take from Jesus’ opening words, as you learn to pray more intimately with your Father, may it draw you closer to Him. For me, learning to pray more meaningfully in the way Jesus taught us starts like this:

Our Father – My big smiling, happy, kind Makua kane.

Who art in Heaven – Door wide open to Your throne, waiting to welcome me into Your loving arms to share time with me, Your beloved child.

Hallowed be thy name – May my speaking your beloved, endearing name be the sweetest of aromas to you, filling your presence with joy and praise.

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Aug 03 2026
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The Christian Life

Lord, Teach Us to Pray

During the week, my morning quiet time is a treasured daily ritual. It’s in this time that I jump start my day with a good cup of coffee, and try to jump start my spiritual walk by reading a devotional, meditating, and praying. All the while enjoying the company of a 55-pound Goldendoodle on my lap. Along with my daily Bible reading, it’s my attempt to maintain some spiritual discipline in my life and to set my feet on the path to following the Lord wherever He may choose to take me in that particular day.

That’s not to say that it always flows smoothly and according to plan. Despite a good sleep score on my Apple Watch, meditation with heavy eyelids easily gives way to power napping. My favorite lap dog tends to believe that belly rubs should take priority over reading a devo on my phone, pinning my arm to the armrest of my chair until she deems puppy cuddle time to be over, or falls asleep. And prayer…that often presents the biggest challenge.

I think many of us struggle to pray. Much like youngsters eagerly writing to Santa as Christmas approaches, we come before God with laundry lists of intentions. Some are more personal either for ourselves or loved ones, while some are more focused on the world at large. Young Rob would leave nothing to chance, getting every wish down on his Christmas list. Adult Rob tends to bring that same approach to prayer, but let’s face it, that’s really tough because there’s always more that we can pray for. It’s a daunting undertaking and it can make it really hard to focus on what God truly intended prayer to be, which is intimate time alone with Him.

Even though the Lord’s Prayer is always there, ready and waiting when I’m struggling to find words to pray, I hesitate because somehow it seems like such a copout. If you’re like me, having grown up in church, you’ve probably had it memorized since kindergarten. And if you’re like my daughter forced in her teen years to begrudgingly pray before bedtime, you can probably buzz through it in about 10 seconds and barely even register any of the words. It’s no wonder that in a quest to feel more spiritual, rattling off that kind of quick, rote offering to God hardly seems like the bold approach to the Throne of Grace that we’re looking for.

But when Jesus’ disciples came to Him and asked Him to teach them how to pray, what followed was a blueprint of how they, and by extension we can and should communicate with our heavenly Father. He took something that had been made complex by tradition and overly self-righteous religious leaders, and boiled it down to a simple, easily-remembered prayer that’s stood as a church staple for centuries. In a more loosely packaged and thought-provoking version of the Our Father than most of us learned, he gave us everything we need.

So, far from seeing it as a copout or a fallback option when our own words fail us, perhaps it’s time to dig deeper into the words Jesus gave us. Time to take a more mindful approach to the blueprint and see what we truly are asking of God in each line, as well as what He’s trying to tell us about how to live in true communion and intimacy with Him. That’s what we’ll try to do over the next several posts. I pray that together, we’ll learn some deeper truths about the Our Father, and about our Father, as we invite Jesus to teach us to pray all over again.

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Jul 28 2026
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The Christian Life

Let God Cook

I’ve always enjoyed the Food Network show Chopped. I’m no gourmet, but since the original Iron Chef first showed up on Food Network, cooking battle shows have tickled my fancy.  One of the most intriguing and challenging aspects of Chopped is the mystery basket.  Not only do the chefs have to battle the clock to create amazing dishes, they must do so using four random, mandatory ingredients revealed only moments before the clock starts.  Prawns.  Chocolate.  Pickled eggplant.  Lemon-herb cough drops.  From disjointed combos such as that they must produce a dish that meets the tough standard of the judges. Some are dazzling successes. Some don’t quite come together but get through by the skin of their teeth. Some end up under a sliver cloche…and…get chopped.

Each of us is something of a mystery basket of random ingredients.  We all have our gifts and talents, hopes and dreams. And most of us have at least some awareness of activities that energize us  As kids we explore and experiment, discovering what our basket holds – and what it doesn’t. As we gradually swap hoods – from child to adult, the ticking clock of the “real world” starts to pressure us into making something publicly presentable, economically productive, and spiritually meaningful (hopefully) of our basket. And like the chefs on Chopped determine what items they need from the pantry and the fridge in order to pull their dish together, we too must pull ingredients from the “pantry” – education, new skills, personal connections, confidence, etc. To be who we think we should be or become, stuff is missing.

Let’s be clear, the Chopped chefs need those other ingredients in some amount to make a cohesive and edible dish. But common mistakes they make are either using so much of those other items that they fail to spotlight the basket items, misusing a basket item due to lack of experience or familiarity with it, or even worse, forgetting to include basket item(s) altogether. Just like the chefs in the competition kitchen, we can go off track when we forsake focusing on the things in the basket that make us who we are. Either we try to pull in too much that is either aspirational or marginal in its impact to living the life God intended for us, or we forget some of our basket ingredients altogether, neglecting real, obvious gifts that we bring to to world: things that others often see more clearly in us than we can in ourselves. Or we may recognize that we’ve been gifted in some way, but lack confidence enough to ever put ourselves out there to use it to full potential. The life that results might be reasonable enough and even somewhat satisfying, but deep down we still feel like something’s missing, or it’s not what it should be.

The solution? Let God cook. The secret to unlocking the best flavor of us, no matter what’s in our basket, lies entirely in the hands of the chef. When we put the apron on and try to cook up the best version of ourselves, we’re always going to fall short. Why? Because to us our basket is a mystery that we keep having to unpack and discover as we go. Our loving Father, the original Master Chef (another great show) knew everything that goes into that basket, and exactly how to pull the very best dish together from it, because He put it there. The “basket” that makes up each one of us unique children of God is no mystery to Him. Unlike those Chopped chefs having to think on their feet and improvise a recipe on the fly to get something decent on the plate, God already had the best plan for each of our lives long before our clock ever started counting down.

Letting God cook isn’t easy. We want control. We often think we know what we want to do, what will make us happy, and what the world expects from us. And sometimes even if we’re clear on what our best ingredients are, putting them together in a way that’s livable and sustainable day-to-day is not a straightforward effort. Speaking from current experience, that can be especially tough to overcome. Having had my position eliminated a few months ago has enabled me to be more fully present for loved ones who’ve needed it in their current seasons of life. It’s also given me time to reflect on what’s in my basket and the life I was trying to cook up with it. And there was a LOT from the pantry in there. While it might have been palatable and even dazzlingly presented to outsiders, it was missing a lot of my basket ingredients and completely unsatisfying to me. I had to step back and realize that if I’m going to come out of this with a dish that satisfies my soul it’s going to require a very delicate and practiced chef, otherwise I’m going to find myself “chopped” from many of life’s more basic physical necessities. God has me in a place where I’m really going to have to let him cook if I’m going to stay in the game.

But Letting God cook is far from just sitting back unaffected and letting life happen to us, either. As each of us reflects on our own basket, we must listen to His voice and trust His guidance to find the best ways to combine our gifts and talents with what the world and our circumstances present us. To do that requires a deeper level of seeking and trusting Him then most of us are prepared for. Following God in this kitchen often involves uncertainty in the day-to-day that we’re definitely not used to, let alone comfortable with. But it’s here that we’re perhaps most open to be made into what God truly envisioned for us when He filled our basket. Total dependence on Him, mixed with mindful action and feeling the Spirit’s flow in moments of energizing efforts enables Him to work through us to create the most beautiful, satisfying, and winning dish that our lives can become.

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Jul 21 2026
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The Christian Life

Giving Up the Relentless Pursuit

Perfectionism. I’ve struggled with it my whole life. To this day I can still see 5-year-old me being so upset after I’d finished coloring a picture of Dopey in a Disney coloring book. I’d chosen brown for the color of his skin, while my mom had colored another one of the Seven Dwarfs with more of a flesh-toned, pinkish hue. In the moment I felt so wrong, like such a failure. I cried and cried and wanted so badly to go back and erase it all and redo it like mom’s and I couldn’t. Mom was so kind and patient in trying to console me but at that moment, I was beyond anything she could offer in words or motherly presence.

Years later I took guitar lessons with a really talented and patient instructor. He could coax such smooth accuracy and tone out of his axe. It was so frustrating for me as I fumbled through whatever track we were working on, my strings producing nothing even close to what my ears hoped to hear. I found it so hard to practice. My mind and my hands at total odds with each other on every measure. Every mistake a glaring reminder how much skill I lacked and how far away I was from ever being a guitarist that anyone would listen to for free, let alone perhaps someday pay money to hear. I should have been able to step back and accept it all as part of the learning process, but the perfectionist in me just cringed at every bad note until I could hardly bear to pick another string.

For as long as I can remember the need to always have everything colored inside the lines with the right color, or matched note for note with perfect tone and timing, has been a constant. Some combination of needing to feel completely capable, a need for control of the world around me, and an overdeveloped sense of idealism has always driven my expectations way beyond reasonable. And the ensuing inevitable disappointment has led to many a self-inflicted emotional beatdown far beyond those post-Dopey coloring blues. It’s in the midst of one of those beatdowns that I humbly come to the keyboard to offer the words you’re reading right now.

Placing an expectation of perfection on people is far more dangerous and destructive. Expecting perfection of ourselves will harm our self-worth, short-circuit the process of learning, growing, and refining our gifts and talents, and rob us of the joy of so many experiences that life has to offer. Expecting perfection of others is far more harmful. Only one perfect person ever walked the earth, and it’s only in Him that we can hope to be one day perfected. As long as we walk the earth we will always fall far short of our own and others’ expectations of us, and others will always fall short of ours. When we lose sight of that, either out of a desire to try to pump ourselves up or to have our world run in the smooth and orderly way we’ve come to think it should, we risk losing our grip on the things we should value the most: our relationships.

Expecting perfection of strangers, whether it’s the dude driving in front of us or the gal behind the counter helping us change our mobile phone plan, just adds needless frustration and negativity to our lives. Expecting perfection out of those closest to us whom we love most dearly has far worse consequences. Even if objectively we can agree that someone’s behavior is less than ideal, the sheer act of “needing to vent” puts us on the slipperiest of slopes. Could be that their flaws shine a brighter light on ours and we’re too uncomfortable to deal with it. Or when their actions conflict with our idea of how the world should work best, resentment and fault-finding result. From the dawn of time we’ve always had the need to feel like there’s at least someone out there not as good as us. Lord knows, whole Christian denominations have sprung up from that notion. So maybe pride triggers us to look down at them: we’ve got our shit together, why don’t they?

I’ve posted on here in the past about taming our tongues and about restraining ourselves from judgement. When both of those are lacking they intersect in ways that even if we feel justified in the moment, can cause lasting damage to our most treasured relationships. We need to pray constantly for God to help us with both. We are all broken. Grace is perhaps the greatest gift that God has offered to us. It’s the gift we need the most. We need to be ever mindful of that, passing that grace through to all around us, including ourselves. As a recovering perfectionist I know how hard it is to give myself grace. We can’t be perfect even in that, or in giving grace to others. But that’s where the Holy Spirit does his best work. When we come clean about our own brokenness, God’s perfection shines through.

We’re all children of God. He made us all, He loves us all, and He knows us perfectly, top to bottom, inside and out. Imagine if God reacted to our faults the way we react to others’. We’d be doomed. Just as God’s love overlooks all our flaws and shortcomings, we too must never forget that our loved ones’ actions and personality quirks, and even how they relate to us is all part of who they are. Otherwise we risk losing sight of their humanity in those moments.

Here’s hoping today we can all lean into God to help us make peace with the imperfection in us and the people and world around us. Because the relentless pursuit of perfection might be fine for Lexus, but for us as God’s imperfect but beloved children, it’s nothing but a dead end journey to the edge of a very painful cliff.

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May 03 2012
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The Christian Life

Going Dark?

In spy circles, the term “going dark” implies a complete lack of communication or presence.  Seeing that it’s been almost a month since my last post on here I suppose my absence could be construed as “going dark.”  Truth is, over the course of the last few posts, I found that my mind, my wellspring of interesting spiritual insights from an everyday guy’s perspective, was “going dark.”  Despite a conscious effort to approach each entry prayerfully, open to what God might want to say through this medium, I just wasn’t feeling it.

I have to confess that I started this blog partially as a means to create an outlet for people to discover my writing, hopefully prompting them to buy my novel(s) (I put the parenthetical “s” on there in the hope that someday I’ll get back to working on some of the many story ideas that percolate in my head.  Right now that’s also on hold.)  I also started this exercise as a way to keep my writing sharp through consistency, and finally, I always have been curious what it’s like to be a newspaper columnist and blogging is probably about the closest an average Joe can get to that type of writing experience.  So although I have made maximum effort to glorify the Lord in this space, the undertaking was something I jumped into without really seeking His guidance first.

More practically, let’s face it, summer is coming, it’s staying lighter longer, the weather’s getting nicer, and sitting down to write isn’t as high on the potential activity list as it is in say, mid-January.  So in many ways I’m not totally surprised that it’s been difficult to keep up with this blog over the long haul.  If the Lord doesn’t build the house, in vain the builders labor.  I hope that the material on here speaks God’s truth the way that He wanted me to.  As hard as I try to, I still find it difficult to be prayerful and contemplative before leaping into one activity or another.  I also find the voice of our Lord very difficult to hear.

The last few months have been a time of self-discovery, as well as a time of God bringing me back to earth. When I first published Winns and Losses, I immediately thought “Okay, here we go.   God’s true pupose for my life is finally coming to pass.  I’m finally going to get my writing out there, sell a ton of copies, and be able to write for a living.   Yay for me.”   Needless to say, it didn’t quite happen that way.   Shortly after publishing, I also started to ravenously digest a bunch of author discussion boards and such, all about how to market your writing.  I really wanted to put myself on the J.K. Rowling, but in the realm of Christian fiction, fast track.  I was sick of going into the office, sick of doing anything for a living that wasn’t being a novelist and a writer.   My attitude was messed up.

Four months since publishing, I sit here having sold a whopping nine copies.  I don’t check my Amazon and Smashwords sales reports like clockwork anymore.  I haven’t written much of anything lately (that’s pretty much what I’ve been saying, hasn’t it?)  Briefly that might have been out of a sense of “What’s the point?”  As time’s gone on, though, I’ve discovered that I had lost sight of all the non-writing things in my life that give it balance.

Too often I tend to look at God’s plan for my life as a destination.  Like at some point the veil will be lifted and He’ll show me, “Here’s what I put you on this earth to do.”  In this time of “going dark” as a blogger/writer/novelist/wannabe, He’s shown me that His plan for my life is far from a single destination.  It’s the daily journey of being a husband/dad/son/friend/technology consultant/volunteer high school football coach/golf enthusiast/Star Wars fan…you get the picture.

God’s will is in the moment.  His calling and what we do to pay the bills may cross paths or they may not.  That’s for Him to decide.  Our mission is simple.  Live the life that He’s put in front of us to live.  For me, part of that means writing when He leads me toward writing, and going dark when He’s got better things for me to do.

Thanks for sticking with me on here.  I’ll be around.

Apr 04 2012
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The Christian Life

The Hunt Is Over

As long as my daughter still believes in the Easter Bunny, my wife and I will spend Easter eve looking for new and creative hiding places for her basket of goodies, and dozens of plastic eggs.  Let’s face it, Easter egg hunts are fun, no matter how old you are.  There’s something about finding a little hidden surprise that brings out the kid in all of us.

While the hunt may be on for eggs and baskets this Easter season, as every other before it, the hunt for Jesus was over long ago.  He’s not in the tomb, though Mary Magdalene and the disciples spent some time hunting there.  He made sure they didn’t have to hunt long, and neither do we.

We can find Jesus even easier.  He’s either already in your heart, if you’re a Christian, or standing outside waiting for you to let Him in, if you’re not.  If He’s in your heart, show Him all the love you can, and thank Him constantly for His Easter miracle.  After all, it was for you, as though you were the only person on Earth.  If you were, He still would have gone to the cross for you.  That’s a treasure far greater than any chocolate bunny.

If He’s not in your heart, what are you waiting for?  Don’t let another Easter come and go still hunting for the peace, joy, love, and salvation only He can give you.

The miracle of Easter is for you.  The cross is for you.  Jesus isn’t in the tomb.  He’s at the door.  Let Him in, and let Him change your life.

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