Tag Archives: daily struggle

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 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 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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