Emotions
Sadness - Part 7: The God Who Turns Your Sorrow Into Dancing
Posted on Tuesday, June 2, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a morning that comes — not for every sadness, not on a schedule we can predict, but it comes — where you realize the weight in your chest has shifted. It has not disappeared entirely. Some of it may never fully leave this side of heaven. But something has changed. The sorrow is no longer the only thing defining you. There is air in the room again. There is a forward step that feels possible.Sadness - Part 6: When Sadness Lingers - The Danger of Isolation and Unprocessed Grief
Posted on Monday, June 1, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a moment in grief when the initial shock wears off and the real weight settles in. The cards have stopped coming. The meals have stopped arriving. Everyone around you has returned to their lives, and you are left standing in a room that still feels wrong - a chair that is empty, a silence that used to be a voice. This is where sadness becomes dangerous. Not because the emotion is wrong, but because what you do with it matters.Sadness - Part 5: Paul, Job, and Elijah — When God's Servants Were Deeply Sad
Posted on Sunday, May 31, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a version of the Christian life that looks effortless. The person of faith who never wavers, never weeps, never sits in the ashes of their own decisions or circumstances and wonders if God has forgotten them. That version of the Christian life does not actually exist in the Bible. Paul was sad. Repeatedly. Job was devastated. Elijah wanted to die. These are not obscure outliers — they are some of the most prominent faithful figures in Scripture.Sadness - Part 4: The Psalms of Sorrow — An Entire Prayer Book Built on Lament
Posted on Saturday, May 30, 2026 at 12:00 AM
If you grew up in a church that mostly sang praise songs, the Psalms can feel like a foreign country. There are songs of triumph, yes — Psalms 23, 91, 117. But there are also songs that feel uncomfortable to sing in public. Songs about feeling abandoned by God. Songs soaked in tears. Songs that sound more like a 3 a.m. conversation with a counselor than a Sunday morning anthem.Sadness - Part 3: Jesus Wept — The God Who Enters Into Your Sorrow
Posted on Friday, May 29, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a moment in the Gospel of John that should quietly wreck you. Jesus has just arrived at the village of Bethany. His friend Lazarus is dead. Mary and Martha meet Him on the road, and the text says something that seems almost redundant — something that, on the surface, tells us nothing we don’t already know: Jesus wept. John 11:35. The shortest verse in the entire Bible. Two words in the original Greek: Jesus wept.Sadness - Part 2: The Anatomy of Sadness — What It Is and What It Is Not
Posted on Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Somewhere along the way, sadness got a bad reputation in Christian circles. Not because the Bible condemns it — it doesn’t — but because we started confusing emotional honesty with spiritual failure. Like if you’re a mature Christian, you should be able to pray away the heaviness and move on. But that’s not how sadness works. And it’s not what the Bible models. Sadness is a natural response to loss. A relationship that ended.Sadness - Part 1: Sadness Is Not a Spiritual Failure
Posted on Wednesday, May 27, 2026 at 12:00 AM
This is the first post in our new series “Emotions and the God Who Meets Us in Them.” In our last series, we talked about anger. Today, we turn to a harder emotion — one the church has often struggled to name well. There is a particular kind of shame that comes when you are a Christian and you are sad. It shows up as an unspoken whisper — sometimes spoken aloud — that says you should be different than this.Anger - Part 7: The God Who Handles His Anger — And Calls You to Do the Same
Posted on Tuesday, May 26, 2026 at 12:00 AM
If you have been following this series from the beginning, you already know the shape of it by now. Anger is not the sin. The sin is what you do with it. That sentence has been the thread running through everything — from the opening question of why we pretend Christians should never be angry, through the anatomy of righteous versus selfish anger, through Jesus’ unsettling teaching on the heart, through the psalms that give us permission to scream at God honestly, through Joseph and Moses and Paul showing us what it looks like when someone gets it right and when they do not, and through the sobering reality of what happens when anger goes unresolved and calcifies into bitterness.Anger - Part 6: When Anger Becomes a Way of Life — The Danger of Bitterness
Posted on Monday, May 25, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Anger is not the problem. You already know that if you have been following this series. The fire in your chest when you see injustice, when someone you love is hurt, when evil goes unchecked — that fire is not the enemy. The danger is what happens when that fire never goes out. The Escalation No One Talks About Ephesians 4:31 gives us a chilling outline of how anger moves when it is left untreated:Anger - Part 5: Joseph, Moses, and Paul — Righteous Anger Done Right
Posted on Sunday, May 24, 2026 at 12:00 AM
One of the most liberating truths in Scripture is this: it is possible to be angry and still walk in wisdom. The Bible does not leave us wondering whether righteous anger is achievable. It gives us people who lived it. Joseph, Moses, and Paul each faced situations that would have justified rage. Each of them responded with a kind of anger that honored God. Their stories are not fairy tales — they are evidence that controlled, purposeful anger is possible, even when the wound is deep.Anger - Part 4: Screaming at God Without Sinning
Posted on Saturday, May 23, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a particular kind of prayer that most of us have never been taught to pray. It goes something like this: God, I am furious. At You. Right now. And I am not going to pretend I am not. If that prayer makes you uncomfortable, you are not alone. But you may also be missing one of the most gifts the Psalms have to offer. The Bible does not give us a sanitized faith.Anger - Part 3: The Hardest Sermon I Ever Preached
Posted on Friday, May 22, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a moment in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says something that makes any preacher quietly set down their notes and pray. It goes like this: “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder’… But I tell you, anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.” Wait. Let that land for a moment. The Old Testament law said you shall not murder. That is already a high standard.Anger - Part 2: The Anatomy of Anger
Posted on Thursday, May 21, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Someone cuts you off in traffic. Your boss takes credit for your idea in front of the whole team. A friend ghosts you after years of friendship, no explanation. And before you even consciously register what’s happening, the heat is already rising. Anger doesn’t wait for permission. It just arrives. But here’s what most teaching on anger gets wrong: it jumps straight to the question of whether you should be angry, completely skipping the far more important question of what anger actually is.Anger - Part 1: God Gets Angry — So Why Do We Pretend We Should Not?
Posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Someone walked into my office last week and said, “I need to apologize.” I braced myself. “I got angry at my daughter,” they continued. “I raised my voice. I felt terrible about it all day.” What struck me was not the anger itself — what struck me was the apology. As though being angry automatically meant they had done something wrong. As though anger, by its very nature, was a failure of spiritual maturity.Anxiety - Part 7: Peace I Leave With You
Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Let us be honest about something before we close this series: you are not going to finish reading this and never feel anxious again. That is not how it works. But here is what may be different after these seven days. When the anxiety comes — and it will come — you will know what to do with it. You will know that it is not a character flaw. You will know that God is not waiting to scold you for it.Anxiety - Part 6: For Those Who Have Been Anxious a Long Time
Posted on Monday, May 18, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Some battles are won in an afternoon. You pray, you feel better, you move on. But what happens when the war has been running for years? What happens when worry is not a storm that blew through but the weather you live in? This is the day for that. If you have been anxious for a long time, you know something the rest of us may only imagine. You know what it is to wake up already tired.Anxiety - Part 5: Casting Your Anxiety — The Practice of Surrender
Posted on Sunday, May 17, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Have you ever tried to hold onto something slippery while someone told you to just let go? Your hands tighten instead. That’s what anxiety can feel like — you’re gripping so hard because you think letting go means losing control. That’s not surrender. That’s just gripping with extra steps. The Bible doesn’t tell us to passively accept our anxiety and hope it fades. It gives us something more specific, more actionable, and frankly, more honest: cast it.Anxiety - Part 4: Paul and the Thorn - When God Says No
Posted on Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a kind of prayer that does not get answered the way we want. And it is the prayers we pray in the dark, knuckles white, begging God to remove something that is eating us alive - those prayers cut deepest when the answer comes back: no.
Paul knew that prayer.
He tells us about it with a rawness that is almost startling. In 2 Corinthians 12, he describes something he calls “a thorn in the flesh.” He does not fully explain what it was - scholars have guessed for centuries - but whatever it was, it devastated him. It haunted him. And three times, he tells us, he begged God to take it away.
Three times.
And three times, God said no.
Anxiety - Part 3: Jesus on Anxiety — The Sermon on the Mount
Posted on Friday, May 15, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Jesus does not whisper this instruction. He does not file it away as an optional addendum. Three times in one passage — Matthew 6:25 through 34 — He says the same thing: Do not be anxious.
Three times. To make sure we heard Him.
Anxiety - Part 2: What Anxiety Actually Tells Us
Posted on Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Anxious people are often told to “just calm down” or “think positive.” But what if anxiety is trying to tell us something? What if the knot in your stomach is not a character flaw but a signal? Anxiety is an alarm system. It sounds when something matters to you. When you lie awake at 3 a.m. replaying a conversation, your mind is not broken — it is telling you that relationships matter.Anxiety - Part 1: Anxiety Is Not a Failure of Faith
Posted on Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 12:00 AM
You are not in trouble with God because you are anxious. Say that again. Slowly. You. Are not. In trouble. With God. Because you are anxious. If that sentence lands hard, that is probably because someone, somewhere, taught you otherwise. Maybe it was a well-meaning voice in a pew. Maybe it was the internalized whisper that if you just trusted better, worried less, prayed harder — you would be fine. That anxiety was proof of some gap in your faith.