Category Archives: prayer

grit: how we wait & keep His way

Posted on by March 6, 2025

I sat at one end of the couch, and our six-year-old with his pink cheeks was at the other. Our nine-year-old had the other couch, and both were banked by coffee tables littered with half-empty beverages.

Up too early with two feverish boys, trying to keep myself healthy and hydrated on only four hours of sleep, I remembered how just in the last post I said my mind was ambitious but my body said no, take a nap. And I wondered if this day would be the same but for different reasons.

grit: how we wait & keep His way | Shannon Guerra

I had just written about limitations, so I guess it was fair that I got to relive it: Limits force us to focus. I could only reach my end of the coffee table, which held my tea, planner, bible, book for class, a scripture verse on a slip of paper, and The House of Seven Gables, all of which I’ve been working my way through.

That sounds productive, but I spent plenty of time just staring blankly out the window, watching the chickadees at the feeder and the cars on the highway. Also, I checked temperatures. Reminded Finn and Kav to drink their tea, and they made slow progress.

Both of the boys had a day – separately, though, praise God – when their fevers spiked high enough to peak with delirium and tachycardia, which is a fancy way of saying we could see their pulses tapping under the curve of their necks while they mumbled nonsense about ice cubes talking and the walls changing shape and color.

It was alarming, but twenty years of reading classic literature hasn’t been for nothing. Everyone who’s read Sense and Sensibility knows that Marianne raved incoherently before her fever broke, too.

So we kept their foreheads cool and let the fevers do their job. And they did, but when we thought they were finally on the mend, a new phase started with congestion and coughing, which didn’t seem fair because that’s not how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to get over whatever it is and move on with life, not just transition into a new form of sickness.

But no, two days later, both boys and I were all coughing and sniffling. Still drinking all the fluids and doing the right things, but also, still working our way through whatever it was. My head hurt when I turned too fast to look left or right, but I mostly felt fine as long as I didn’t do anything ambitious like leave the couch.

Sometimes we think we’re making progress, but then we suddenly realize there’s so much more ahead than we had anticipated. And it doesn’t feel like progress anymore; it feels more like discouragement, or even defeat.

He sees you when small steps forward cause you to grieve, because it seems like they ought to be bigger steps forward by now…or they ought not to have been needed at all because the circumstances should never have happened.

You’re not in trouble for having mixed feelings over progress that restores the regress of hard situations.

It’s okay to be both grateful for the progress and grieved over its necessity.

He is doing something in both the grief and the gratitude.

– Grit: Kindling to Relight the Wounded and Weary

I gathered the empty cups and crumpled tissues, thought about the work that would need to be set aside for another day. Wondered how long it would last, and how much I wasn’t going to get done this week.

And then I heard the Lord say, What if this isn’t sickness, but immunity?

Because that’s what perseverance and grit develop.

Wait for the Lord and keep to his way,
and he will exalt you to inherit the land;
you will look on the destruction of the wicked.

– Psalm 37:34

When we learn to focus and persist in the task that’s right in front of us, we protect ourselves from a lot of the drama and distractions in our periphery. We’re not necessarily unaware, but we’re on a mission.

(Like right now, she typed, ignoring the cat who repeatedly walked across her lap, meowing for attention.)

Being stuck on the couch with sick kids is not all that different from being stuck on the couch nursing a baby, which is how I’ve spent almost eleven years of my adult life. Those were the short years filled with long days; different couch, but the same coffee table. Those slow days taught me to steward what was in reach no matter how chaotic everything else out of reach was – drink the water, read the book, memorize the verse. Look out the window, observe and pray.

And this, too, is progress.

Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him;
do not fret over those who prosper in their way,
over those who carry out evil devices.

– Psalm 37:7

A few weeks ago one of our pastors said the difference between persistence and stubbornness is the direction you’re going, and that’s familiar because we’ve talked about holy stubbornness for a looong time.

Things don’t always go the way we want, but when we practice patient self control, playing it cool, we look like Jesus because we’re doing what He did. The Bible, of course, doesn’t say He “played it cool;” it uses phrases like divine forbearance...but the essence is the same. We, too, are looking past the wrongs and trusting Him to bring things right as we press on in the face of less than ideal circumstances.

We’re doing what needs to be done, no matter how humble or ugly or unimpressive it seems. We’re pressing forward through the obstacles. And we’re letting go of the things out of reach, out of our jurisdiction and control.

We’re (a)biding our time in gritty surrender.

Our steps are made firm by the Lord
when he delights in our way;
though we stumble, we shall not fall headlong,
for the Lord holds us by the hand.

– Psalm 37:23-24

I didn’t want the kid to make that choice, I didn’t want to have to prune that relationship, I didn’t want that to happen. But it’s less about what we want, and more about how we respond once we see things as they are: Will we look to Him? Will we sit at His feet? Will we trust Him and forge ahead, however we’re able?

…let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

– Hebrews 12:1b-2

We are image bearers, becoming Who we behold even (especially) when it’s not easy to keep our focus. Like Mary of Bethany, who defied all kinds of opposition – including her closest family member and the cultural expectations of the day – to enter a room of men (scandalized gasp!) in order to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn from Him. She defied religious norms just like she’d seen Him do, and whenever she was attacked, Jesus came to her defense.

Mary was mantled with authority because of her grit.

The Lord helps them and rescues them;
he rescues them from the wicked and saves them
because they take refuge in him.

– Psalm 37:40

Another thing we talked about in church recently was the process of refining gold. My friend who has personal experience with this pointed out that when gold is refined, impurities are removed – which means the weight is reduced but the value is increased.

I must become less, He must become more…so we make space for Him to move, and give permission to Him to refine us.

Friend, if you are in a hard spot, do you see how He is letting you in to see the inner place, where most people aren’t willing to go? He’s showing you the place in His heart where He also went through change that felt like loss. Betrayals, misunderstandings, moves, and new directions. Rejection, people changing, culture shifting.

And He’s not wasting any of this.

…we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions,
knowing that affliction produces endurance,
and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope,
and hope does not put us to shame,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

– Romans 5:2b-5

You know that one area that you’ve struggled with for so long – the one you’ve confessed and repented and prayed and changed habits for, but the battle is in the mind and you’re still at war, wondering if you’ll ever see victory. Wondering if things will ever change.

What if you started seeing yourself in that situation from God’s perspective? What if you saw it as He sees it now: after the resurrection, after death and hell have been defeated?

What if you stopped seeing yourself as bad at handling this situation? Because we fight from victory, not for it.

Much of the enemy’s game is just bluffing and confusion. He wants to convince us to agree with him that this is just how it is, this struggle is our “cross” (ooh, he’s good at twisting scripture!), and we just aren’t spiritual enough to figure this out yet.

But if we agree with God and know that we have been given every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, including the authority to trample the enemy to pieces, we’ll look at it (and ourselves) differently.

We’ll know this is a work in progress but that God is making the progress, and our situation was never hopeless.

We aren’t bad at dealing with it. We just haven’t seen how good we are at conquering it yet.

No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us.

— Romans 8:37

In difficulty, opposition, or loss – or sickness or frustration or lack – we can choose to forge ahead, even when we’re sitting still. We’re not looking at this through fear’s lens anymore, focusing on the negative possibilities. We’re not looking through defeat’s lens, feeling like it’s over too soon and we blew it.

No, now we see through victory’s lens: abiding, watching it play out, not responding with knee-jerk reactions, but making deliberate moves in trust, confident that the Lord is at work, and He’s giving us the wisdom we need for our work, too.

What will we do when there’s so little within reach? Will we build even when our resources are limited and the materials aren’t ideal? Will we keep going even when the way is more uphill than we expected?

As we look to Him, we start to see like He does, too, and our perspective changes. So…what if this situation isn’t what it looks like? He’s teaching us to be alert, and to recognize that some things are not just what they seem.

What if it’s not really sickness or hardship or loss? What if it’s actually protection and preparation and provision?

It’s not sickness, it’s immunity — this situation isn’t taking from our lives, but adding to it. With the right perspective and gritty surrender, it’s gain, not loss. It’s adding steel to our spines, integrity to our intentions, wisdom to our experience, strength to our mind and character, and the ability to withstand.

Because slow progress is preparation, not punishment. Every time we trust Him, we protect our path forward. So much is happening that we can’t see, and God is doing miracles in us in the meantime as we look toward Him.

This is now available if you’ve been burned out or discouraged, and need some fuel for your calling. Grit is the first in the Kindling series — short, powerful, beautiful books to help relight you. Just $7 for the instant download, and you get both the full-color version and the black & white printable version, too. xo

holy of holies: the Presence is closer than we think

Posted on by March 13, 2025

The sunlight of longer days in February produces the same effect as caffeine to someone who never drinks it. Beams splash across the floor and the table, and suddenly everything is brighter, more hopeful, and ambition takes dangerous proportions.

I could plant the celery. We could let the chickens out of the coop. Never mind that it’s below freezing at night; the expanded hours of sunshine throw logic and reason out the window and we start to dream again. I could do this, I could do that, I could do anything.

holy of holies: the Presence is closer than we think | Shannon Guerra

It reminds me of wisdom I learned many years ago: One should never mix an extra shot of espresso with writing the week’s to-do list, because the superpowers from Monday’s latte might become the hole you can’t dig yourself out of by Friday.

By Tuesday I’m already wondering about that as I putter around, cleaning the house between helping kids with school.

“How’s it going up there?” Vin asks as I stop by his desk on the way to drop off laundry.

“My mind is ambitious and wants to do things,” I tell him, “but my body is like Nooo, it wants to get a blanket and lay down on the couch.”

By Tuesday, I don’t want to clean the bathroom or put away laundry. I don’t want to edit three more chapters or format paragraphs or change graphics. I don’t really even want to read email, or journal, or type.

I want to take a bath. I want to shut off the notifications, close the door, dim the light. Turn down the noise and rest.

It’s like the mom-version of the Holy of Holies. This is the sacred space that’s quiet and rarely accessed, and only then once all the sacrifices have been made to get there. We’ve made atonement for sins through the washing of many loads of laundry and dishes, and we silently approach, exhausted, face down, knowing our need for His presence.

The real Holy of Holies, of course, was the innermost part of the Temple of Jerusalem, where God’s presence dwelt. It was the most sacred space, separated by a thick curtain (“the veil”) from the also-but-not-quite-as-sacred space just outside. Only a certain priest could go in, and he could only do it once a year. Praise God, bath nights are more frequent than that.

But also, if you know about the death of Jesus, you know that when He said, “It is finished,” that veil was torn from top to bottom. So we all have access now because the Presence erupted forth and landed within each of us who have invited Him in.

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?

– 1 Corinthians 3:16

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?

– 1 Corinthians 6:19

So now His Presence dwells within us and our hearts are the Holy of Holies. And this is maybe too big of a thought for a tired Tuesday, or a busy Thursday, or a frantic Friday. But it’s still true, and something we should wrestle with until we can wrap our minds around it.

Meanwhile on that tired Tuesday, there are three hours to go until the bath, the dim lights, the restful retreat. He is there in the midst of the exhaustion and to do list, so for the joy set before me – which is not just the quiet bath, but also the accomplishment of a project that is so close to finally being finished – I’ll work on these last twenty pages.

But first I’ll run downstairs to refill my water and grab the phone charger, then come back upstairs to drink that water while reading a few posts in my email. An hour later, I’ll realize I forgot the charger on the first trip and run back down for it again. Because even when the joy is set before me, I tend to get pretty distracted with details.

We must get delivered from ourselves, and His presence is the very thing that will prune us.

– Michael Freeland Miller, His House, His Presence

On Wednesday I am short on time at the desk (“On Wednesday,” she says, as though every other day has looooads of time) and Bingley the Small Puma jumps up and demands attention while I am holding a book in my left hand and typing as fast as possible with my right.

This book has passages that I need to get in me, that might become part of the post I’m working on – or they might not, but the message is definitely flavoring the stew. But Bingley gets right in my face and doesn’t care that my hands are already full or that I’ll need to go back and edit the extra vowels he made me type along with the constant need to insert all the h’s I missed because my keyboard has something miniscule stuck in it (probably a cat hair) and for three years now the H key has been capricious, which means sometimes it works fine and other times it makes me type in a Cockney accent.

Bingley cares about none of those things because his sole focus is the presence of the one who loves him. And if I’m at the desk, then the desk is the sacred space he runs to.

He is learning manners, though: He may not step on the laptop, back onto the keyboard, or knock over my tea. We have standards (not many, but some) and he can’t just walk all over the place, because this is my sacred space too. If he ignores the boundaries, I push him away.

A few months ago in group we were discussing the dwelling place, where the Lord resides – how the Holy of Holies left the building when Jesus died on the cross; the curtain was torn and the Spirit was loosed and tongues of fire emerged and our free access to Him changed everything:

So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone;

in him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

– Ephesians 2:19-22

We hold the sacred place within us, and He is there. Here. Breathing, pulsing, burning, inside.

So we approach Him with awe. But another fascinating thing that came up in our discussion: If we recognize His presence with awe and wonder, marveling at the intimacy and closeness with Him because He dwells within us, then also, in Kingdom culture, do we recognize that He is also within each other?

Do you not know that your body is a Temple of the living God? Yes, we know, it says it right there. But have we considered that when we look at a fellow citizen of the Kingdom, they also are housing the presence of God? They, too, are temples that host the King.

What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God, as God said,

“I will live in them and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.”

– 2 Corinthians 6:16

Temple, in Greek, is naos, derived from the verb naio, meaning “to dwell.” In the New Testament it specifically refers to the inner sanctuary, the most sacred part of the temple where God’s presence dwells, the Holy of Holies. And we clearly see that it’s no longer talking about a building.

Suddenly the world flips inside out as we realize there’s this galaxy within our hearts, the temple where worship is always occurring:

For this reason they are before the throne of God
and worship him day and night within his temple,
and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

– Revelation 7:15

At this very moment, worship is happening. We can choose whether or not to join it or be consciously aware of it, but regardless, it is actively occurring, right now, at this very second, always. This holy place is in us and we don’t understand it and can’t wrap our minds around it, but we are here and there all at once, and so much more is happening than we realize.

God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

– Ephesians 2:4-6

A person’s life is a holy thing. So do we recognize the Holy of Holies in each other’s hearts? Do we hold each other’s confidence and trust in fear and trembling? Or do we incautiously push the curtain aside, our recklessness creating a draft of air that causes the flame to flicker? Are we acting as mere men, or are we saints and priests, the redeemed who recognize that each of us is a temple wherein His presence resides?

And in that light, we learn manners and approach each other with a little awe, too. Our kids, our friends, our spouses: I revere the flame within you, and so help me God, I will not blow it out.

So we must take care of ourselves, and take care of each other. Caring for the body – literal and figurative – is both a gift and a holy commission.

On the frantic Friday when I am finishing a post and looking at Monday’s to-do list that has no hope in the world of being completed in the next two hours, He is there.

I look at the uncrossed items on the list and know that two can easily move to next week, and the last item is being typed at this second. The holy work of washing the eggs and teaching the kids and sending one kid outside to do chores was finished earlier. The holy work of the moment is in progress. And the holy work that hasn’t been done yet, that was the result of too much caffeine and ambition on Monday, will be just as holy next week.

And so we worship, because He is here in the midst of it, and the joy is set before us.

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lay it on the table: how surrender solves the problems of the world

Posted on by December 30, 2024

Every December we shove other responsibilities aside and spend hours at the puzzle table, solving the problems of the world. It starts the weekend after Thanksgiving, when we smush furniture around to make room for the table and the Christmas tree, which is a cozy alternative to how we smush things around in the summer, when we have birds living in our bathroom for three months of the year.

(Sidenote: You may be progressing in your homesteading efforts if a friend visits and exclaims, “Oh! I’ve never used your bathroom when it didn’t have quail in it!” So fancy.)

lay it on the table: how surrender solves the problems of the world | Shannon Guerra

This last puzzle was difficult because at one point we had sections that started to connect from one side to the other, but there were odd gaps in one direction and tight spots on the other where the frame had warped a bit. We knew the pieces should fit, we just couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t.

At one point I wondered if it was just a bad puzzle. There are some, you know – badly constructed, impossible to solve, and you only find out once you’re about halfway through. Then you have to decide if you’re going to keep going, or toss it and start over with something else.

Also, with pretty much every puzzle, there comes a point when I’m totally confounded and convinced that a certain piece must be a mistake because it has nowhere to go. This has to be a stem, but all the stems are finished…this one has to be a yellow flower, but there aren’t any yellow flowers left…we check and recheck, convinced the maker must’ve made a mistake and somehow this piece, which obviously doesn’t actually go with this puzzle, somehow got slipped into this box by accident.

But eventually, always, we find the place. OHHHHH, we exclaim as it clicks in, eureka. Suddenly it all makes sense: We couldn’t find it because we thought it was this color but it was actually the shading of that color, or we thought it couldn’t possibly attach and go there because of the lines in the drawing, but the cut of the jigsaw hid the transition from the stem to the leaf, or the edge where it changed from petal to background.

So as we sit here and exchange the pieces that confound us, we are recognizing more and more that what we think we’re looking at is sometimes not what it seems. We have the big picture but miss the small detail – or just as often, we have the small detail but miss the big picture.

Our work here, solving all the problems of the world, happens in small increments. With the puzzle that buckles, we have to make tiny shifts, move just a couple pieces at a time. It is gentle, steady work to make room for the sections that are supposed to fit.

We’ve tried it the other way; when we pulled the whole thing, sections tore away from the tension.

But there’s a thousand pieces, and so much needs to move, we think. Changing it all at once doesn’t work, though. We make room and move the loose, extra pieces out of the way, and it’s grace here, gentleness there, self control where we want to force our way…and we move a couple pieces at a time, realizing that tiny moves are the best influence on the big picture, because our forceful moves create disaster.

So this is a patient dance, one step here, one effort there; it helps to recognize every tiny victory, and overlook many forgivable imperfections. Our pieces need to shift and make room for each other, because there’s a gap here, and the space between is too big to fill. And that makes sense, because on the other side there’s not enough space for the other pieces that need to go in.

Washington had spent long hours talking to the officers, showing patience and tolerance, probing their sensitivities, hearing their complaints. It was subtle, had to be, the slow tilting of the level ground about which the men had so much pride.

As the officers themselves began to understand how they fit into the larger army, they began to have pride in their own units, in the behavior and deportment of their own men, in their own ability to command. They began to understand how discipline was of value after all, not just for convenience, but for each officer’s own value to the army.

– Jeff Shaara, Rise to Rebellion

On the other side of the table, Finn is sitting at the couch with a Rubik’s cube and confesses that he has solved it by peeling its stickers off and putting them back where he wanted them to go. I admit this is also how I’ve sometimes dealt with problems I couldn’t solve: We take the broken pieces and superglue them back on so everything looks fairly normal, as long as you don’t get too close and realize what a patch job it is.

But eventually, hopefully, there comes a time when we’re sick of the easy fix that was never good enough, and we want to be done with our inadequate coping skills. We want the real solution, and the real solution is always the work that needs to be done in us, not others, because it is inside us that all of our misperceptions and assumptions are made, our attitudes are born, our wounds are infected, and our potential for joy is hidden, however it is buried under difficult circumstances.

We need real healing, real freedom, and we’re willing to go through the pain or revelation we’ve been avoiding to face the One who knows how to put us back together the right way, because He’s the one who made us in the first place.

And this is where small moves will never be enough, because we’re no longer dealing with other people – I mean, external pieces – but with our own inward parts. Our own tiny efforts err in too much gentleness as we resign to just live with it and deal, and that can go on for a long time, maybe forever, unless we get impatient and move to the other extreme, creating disaster.

So we cannot do the effective work on our own pieces all by ourselves. When we’re broken enough to want real healing, we need to surrender to the Maker familiar with the big picture and all the details, who knows how our inward parts work, where the jigsaw needs to cut, and where all of our pieces go.

There’s a character in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader who, through a series of circumstances and bad choices, becomes something unexpected. He needs healing and he thinks he knows how to go about it, so he starts to cast his skin:

“I scratched a little deeper and, instead of just scales coming off here and there, my whole skin started coming off beautifully….But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before.”

Like we often discover, our own efforts don’t go deep enough. So we try the same thing, harder:

“Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off?”

Eventually, depending on how stubborn – or evasive – we are, we realize the truth: We can’t do this. He has to be the one to heal us. And this is where surrender happens.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart….he peeled the beastly stuff right off…and there is was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

He cuts our wrong edges off in precise curves, not taking anything that needs to stay and not leaving anything that needs to go. But He doesn’t do it the same way in each of us.

A few weeks ago in class we talked about how God moves us in surrender. For the chatty extrovert, sometimes surrender looks like waiting in uncomfortable silence; for the introvert, it looks like reaching out to the person who is new and starting a conversation. For the impatient mom, it looks like listening to the angsty rant of a teen rather than immediately giving the answer. For the overindulgent mom, it looks like setting a boundary and holding to it.

Whatever it is, overcoming our preferred comfort is how we die to self to become truly alive, and it’s the surgery we need, revealing the tender, raw perfection of His design underneath.

Our own vulnerability makes us walk more tenderly toward others. Simultaneously, as we realize how efficient His work is, it makes us want to surrender our stubborn ways faster, and we move in bolder freedom than ever before. Surrender is a cycle that continuously strengthens.

We cannot do the giant work in others. Our own efforts aren’t even enough to do the perfect work in ourselves. All we can do are the small everyday steps of obedience, finding where this piece goes, sorting out those other pieces, moving loose pieces out of the way so there’s room for the right ones to go in.

So we lay it all on the table – the pieces we think we know what to do with, the ones we have no idea what they’re for, and the ones we’ve been hiding in our pocket so no one else could touch them.

It’s all out there. The picture is coming together. We sit in the tension of seeking answers until we have the aha moment when it clicks, and we finally see it the way the Maker does — the details, the big picture, everything in place — and we unbend our twisted frame back into His alignment, making room for all the pieces He designed to be there.