Articles

Jesus prayed on the night before he died. He asked, three times, for the cup to pass. The cup was not taken. This is the most important unanswered prayer in the Bible.

The silence of God is not the same as the absence of God. It does not feel that way when you are inside it. The prayers no longer reach anywhere, the Bible reads like a closed door. The feeling is real. The conclusion is not the only one available.

Some loneliness is a season. Other loneliness does not ease. It sits down with you in the morning, walks you to the kettle, wakes you at 3 a.m. If that is your loneliness, this is for you. Practical, not magical.

There are seasons when prayer goes quiet. Where the words won't come and the ceiling feels closer than it used to. If you have lived with depression or anxiety, you know this silence.

For some people the hardest part of church is not the theology or the music or the sermon. It is the moment someone turns to them in the foyer and asks the one question they have been dreading all week.

What do you say to a young man in his twenties who has been told, quietly and without fanfare, that the rehab centre is not a waystation back to ordinary life — but simply his life? What does hope mean when the horizon does not change?

The stoning of Paul at Lystra. It is hard to read it without thinking that Paul, lying in the dust outside the city, may have remembered another stoning — one he had once stood by and approved of.

Henri Nouwen pointed out that the gospel writers used four words to describe what Jesus did with the bread. He took it. He blessed it. He broke it. He gave it. Nouwen believed these four movements describe not just a miracle but a life. Yours.

We have been taught, quietly and persistently, that tears are something to move through on the way to something better. What if they are not the waiting room? What if they are, sometimes, the sanctuary itself?

The father in the parable does not appear to be doing anything when the son returns. But the text suggests he has been watching the road for a long time. There is something to be said about what that watching costs — and what it means.

The hardest thing about waiting is not the length of it. It is the silence that comes with it — the feeling that the waiting means something about you, or about whether God is still there.

Most of us were never handed the terms explicitly. We absorbed them slowly, in Sunday school and sermon illustrations and the quiet pressure of being around people who seemed to have it together. The contract felt real. The problem is that God never signed it.