Tag Archives: trust

Sep 21 2026
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The Christian Life

Living The Dream – The Joseph Experience

Cloaked figure standing beneath a sunlit opening in a dark stone cavern

One of the more poignant stories in the Old Testament is that of Joseph, one of the twelve sons of Jacob. Joseph was Jacob’s first son of his beloved wife, Rachel, and therefore his favorite. Jacob made no bones about that, either, gifting Joseph a coat of many colors (not sure if it was Technicolor!) And as a youngster, Joseph seemed to make no bones about his standing in the family, which increasingly drew the ire of his older brothers.

Joseph was a dreamer, and often his dreams involved metaphors which seemed to reinforce his favored standing with God and his superior standing to that of his brothers. For instance, he had a dream that he and his brothers were harvesting grain, and all of their bundles of grain bowed down to his bundle. This would prove prophetic as time went on, but at the time, all it did was fuel his brothers’ anger and jealousy towards him. Eventually, they hatched a plot to get rid of their braggadocious bro by throwing him in a well, and then selling him into slavery to a passing traveler.

Young Joe wound up in Egypt and eventually in the service of a man named Potiphar. Joseph served him well and earned his master’s favor, but when Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph and he resisted, she lied about the incident and landed Joseph in prison, where he spent several years. Imagine how Joseph must have felt sitting in an Egyptian jail with no real prospect of being set free. Not exactly “living the dream.” Surely he must have questioned God’s plans for him during that rock-bottom experience, maybe even allowing himself doubts about God’s very existence. Even when it seemed his ship had come in after helping Pharaoh’s cupbearer get his job back after he’d found himself in the clink for a spell, the man forgot about him and Joseph remained locked up.

Yet the entire time, God was at work. Perhaps He knew that in order for Joseph to fulfill his true purpose, he needed to be humbled and broken down. Or maybe God was merely testing Joseph’s faithfulness. Sometimes it’s only when we’re at rock bottom that God can finally break through to us fully – like we only realize He’s our best option when He becomes our only option. Whatever God was doing, I’m sure the situation made no sense to Joseph. Only God really knows what He was doing in Joseph’s life at that time, and really, He’s the only one who needed to.

I believe it’s still the same with us today. You may be going through a season in your life that makes zero sense to you. You may have tried everything you can humanly do to make things better and gotten absolutely nowhere. You’re at rock bottom. Feeling lost and forgotten. Hopeless. Living out a true “Joseph experience.” But guess what? God’s still got you.

Eventually, the cupbearer remembered Joseph in a critical moment when Pharaoh had a troubling dream and needed answers. God gave Joseph the interpretation, and Pharaoh gave Joseph the loftiest of positions, overseeing the preparations for all of Egypt to weather the coming famine which God showed him that Pharaoh’s dream had foretold. And as for Joseph’s dreams…well…they came true too. When the famine hit Israel, Jacob sent Joseph’s brothers to Egypt to buy food, and who did they end up bowing down to? You guessed it, their long lost brother. After all the betrayal and suffering and waiting that Joseph had experienced, in the end God gave him a happy family reunion.

I myself am in the midst of a “Joseph experience.” I have no idea what God’s endgame looks like either. But I know that through all of this I need to trust that God has not forgotten me. Whatever testing, sharpening, humbling He’s determined that I need, I know that I need to trust that He’s preparing me for something. Something far beyond anything I could dream of. And if you’re like me, going through your own “Joseph experience,” you too need to believe and trust that God is right there with you, preparing you for something great.

So hold on. Help is coming. You’re getting out of jail, and when you do, it will be like a dream come true. God is good.

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Sep 14 2026
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Sports, The Christian Life

Place at the Table

One of my guilty-pleasure movies is The Program – a 1993 film that chronicles the ESU Wolves, a fictional Division I college football program. As an inside look at big time college football the movie definitely has its flaws. (How does a D-I program only have two – TWO! – assistant coaches?) And as a guy who once upon a time did radio play-by-play for a D-I sport, albeit basketball, the announcing is nails-on-a-chalkboard atrocious. Hard Knocks it is not. More like a collage of cliches of what someone in Hollywood imagined must go on behind closed doors in major college football programs. Still, it’s worth a watch if you like football.

One of the storylines follows Steve Lattimer, a backup linebacker played by Andrew Bryniarski. Determined to crack the starting defense after three seasons on the punt team, Lattimer returns to campus for his final season packing a chemically-enhanced physique and the chemically-overcharged attitude to match. It’s obvious to everyone except James Caan’s Coach Winters that Lattimer has been juicing – using anabolic steroids – to fuel his transformation from a punt team scrub to a starting defense beast. And when even his teammates voice their suspicions, Steve doesn’t deny it. As he puts it “you do what you have to do to play.”

While the players in the story are more caricatures that characters, there’s something honest in Lattimer’s story. Anyone who’s loved a sport but was a marginal athlete has longed for their “place at the table” and would probably trade just about anything to get their shot. It’s easy to imagine many in a similar position considering the shortcut that Steve takes in the movie. There’s only room for 11 players on the field, and everyone on the team should want one of those spots. The end goal is understandable, even though there’s no justifying the means. And for Lattimer, kind of an “anti-Rudy” if you will – another good 1993 football film – without chemical help, we see his own athletic gifts ultimately betray him in a critical moment. Sans-steroids, he wasn’t worthy of his place at the table.

For us as God’s children, there’s no shortcut we can, or need, take to earn our place at the table. Jesus already did everything He had to do so that we can one day play on the fields of the Lord’s kingdom. Beyond accepting the Lord’s grace through Jesus, there’s nothing else we can do that will get us there. It’s all through Him. Just like Lattimer’s inherent football skills weren’t enough, neither are our own human efforts to be spiritual, to do good, to try to live a life of faith on our own. And self-help books, going to church more, seminars, etc. – noble enhancements to our routing unlike Steve’s harmful ones – won’t ultimately get us our place at His table. Just like the Iowa running back does to Lattimer in one of the film’s pivotal moments, life in this imperfect world will ultimately bowl us over at the goal line if we don’t put all our trust in Christ.

Putting our trust in Christ is not easy by any means, nor is it a merely passive pursuit. While steroids fueled Steve’s physical transformation, he still had to spend the time in the weight room. We need to spend our time in the spiritual weight room: reading God’s Word, praying, meditating. It’s just that as we do those things, we need to lean on God and His wisdom to fuel our spiritual growth. Not just mere memorization or repetition. Not our intellect or the intellects of others (yours truly included.) The catalyst for true spiritual growth must always be the Holy Spirit working in and through us.

As we walk with Jesus, seeing our faith growing and maturing, we need to recognize that we’re going to fail sometimes. Life is still going to score on us. Much like Jesus’ disciples, our day-to-day walk with the Lord will be filled with challenges, uncertainty, and even resistance from some who we thought were on our team. There will be plays that don’t go our way, but we need to rest assured as long as we keep looking to Jesus, we’re always in the game, and our place at the table is secure.

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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 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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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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