Category Archives: purpose

when you want to live the dream

Posted on by March 12, 2026

The conversation always starts the same way:

“What do you do for a living?”

“Oh, I’m a writer.”

“Wow, what do you write?”

when you want to live the dream: how we get clarity in the longing

Usually at this point I fumble with an awkward answer involving books, newsletters, and snarky posts on social media. But several times I’ve been tempted to finish it like this:

“Actually, nothing. I get a few hundred words in, and then my computer is highjacked with random updates for the next three hours while I ponder a future of providing for my family by selling giant homemade peanut butter cups on the black market.” 

Because we all want to live the dream, but few things go as we expect them to. And it turns out, the dream is a ton of work.

Over the last decade our family went through several life-changing, sometimes devastating transitions. We learned how to live in isolation. We learned to live with the unexpected. We learned how to deal with extreme limitations. We learned how to live without supports that many other families have.

And in the more recent years of owning a business and writing full time, we’ve learned to live with unpredictable (read: sometimes nonexistent) income. We’ve learned how to make routines that work for both of us — and eight kids — as we’ve navigated the difficult dream of doing work and ministry together at home.

Easy?

No way. Not for a single minute.

But it’s been so good. I’m learning again that we can trust Him. We can do new, brave things we never would’ve considered before. 

On a good week, we start by clearing the rubble out of the way: Repenting, searching, asking God about those stuck places and what needs to be removed for Him to flow through again. I feel so inept at this, but He meets us when we recognize our weakness rather than when we pretend expertise.

Friends, every dream has come with more work than I could have imagined, and it takes more dedication than I sometimes think I have. I’ve learned to hold my expectations with an open hand, because without surrendering the dream to God, it becomes an idol – and then a nightmare. If we ask Him to use us, we must also allow Him to move us in ways we could not have expected.

But even still, God wants us to dream. He doesn’t put these things inside us to tease us.

If you find yourself up late at night, thinking of new ideas and new dreams that He’s giving you, and you have no idea what to do with them, write them down and look them straight in the face. You can put them on screen or on paper, but at least give them some tangible words.

And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.

– Habakkuk 2:2

Ask Him if it’s for real, if it’s for now, if it’s for just you, or if it’s for you and some others He’s also talking to. Tell Him He can do what He wants with it. Get gutsy, go all out, and tell Him He can throw you right outside the small margin of comfort zone you might have recently recovered, and pitch you right into His exciting, marvelous, bigger-than-we-could-possibly-come-up-with-on-our-own mission.

But friends, that dream you long for? That calling you’re working toward? That victory you’ve prayed for? You have to choose between it and the comfort zone, because they do not mingle, they take each other’s oxygen, and only one of them finds victory in surrender. 

He is always growing us as far as we are willing to move.

Just because things don’t look the way you expected doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re not perfect at predicting the future (which you’re not meant to be) or controlling outcomes (which you’re not meant to do).

If you are struggling with these transitions, please know that it takes time to settle into routines that work. It takes trial and error, and the error doesn’t mean failure. It means growth. It means you’re getting closer to the solution that puts all the pieces in the right place.

For those of us waiting for a labor to end, and for the promise of fullness to come to fruition: There is a messy beauty to works in progress. And we are all a work in progress.

This season is teaching you to let go of those expectations and trust God. It doesn’t mean you lower your standards; it means you raise your eyes. You are learning to look past this present circumstance to see His vision for you, which is bigger than you imagined.

___________________________________________

This is an excerpt from ABIDE volume three: Clarity in the Longing. You can find it here.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light

Posted on by May 26, 2026

I’m not proud of it, but lately my domestic abilities are extremely…how do I put this? Minimalist. I don’t rearrange furniture, don’t buy cute décor, don’t keep up with style blogs. I suffer through necessary cleaning like everyone else. And now that Vince and I both work at home, our oldest kids do most of the cooking.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light (shannon guerra)

The only household chore I truly love is rearranging books. Thanks to seven kids who never reshelve anything (insert strict librarian scowl here), I get to do it almost daily.

Vin knows I love moving books around and he recently left one of his new ones to my disposal. It was light brown, clothbound, and he said I could put it wherever I wanted.

So I looked around, pondered, and dragged the piano bench across the library. Then I stacked the new book on a high shelf with some of his others.

He didn’t notice for a couple of days. Then one morning he found it and protested, announcing “it doesn’t go there.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t go there?” I laughed. “You said I could put it wherever I wanted.”

He threw up his hands in exaggerated despair. “I trusted you to respect the book, and you put it way up there! It’s a beautiful copy about the War of 1812. And I didn’t expect you to put it on a stack, sandwiched between a book by Ted Koppel and an old copy of The Silmarillion!”

The nerd is strong with this one. As you can see, he is a closet book rearranger, also.

That was in the morning. By afternoon, we’ve reached the part of the day when I am at my desk to write, and the ideas and motivations are just…poof, gone. I sit and stare. Open and shut files, open and shut my journal. Look at my notes. Rearrange things on my desk, and somehow it’s not any neater after a few minutes of doing so.

prayer like clouds: shannon guerra

Yet on Sunday night when I was getting ready to take a bath – on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and in a place without any writing material whatsoever – all sorts of ideas just flooded over me.

The creative thoughts are supposed to come when I’m conveniently in front of my laptop, or at least with a pen and paper handy. But it almost never fails; the creativity flows without effort in the most unexpected places. The expected place requires work, and concentration, and discipline. Which looks like a lot of sitting and staring.

I don’t think it’s Murphy’s Law so much as it is the need for fresh oxygen to stir up new thoughts, creating opportunities to observe and notice new things. Up here in my office, in spite of all the windows, the view doesn’t really change all that much: The desk is a mess. The floor is lined with throw pillows and crates of books and yarn. Usually there’s a few blocks or toys scattered all over. And out the window, trees are trees.

But…not really. It’s spring and the leaves are unfurling outside. The aspens are covered in millions of pale green stars that flash and twinkle in the breeze. Sometimes the sky is classically blue, but on this day it was cloudy and dramatic, steel grey, shot through with shafts of sunlight against chartreuse new leaves. My favorite. Or one of my favorites, at least.

And there, noticing life around me, I have a few sentences to write about. They string together and start to accumulate into something substantial.

That night I drove to Bible study, and prayer came the same way as I sat and stared, driving down the highway. It came out in small phrases, thinking of what we needed for the night: Good conversation. No one feeling awkward or out of place. Everyone to be at ease, comfortable in their own skin. More concerned with encouraging each other than with impressing each other.

Sometimes they were real sentences, and sometimes they were just one-second thought prayers: Safe driving. Peace in hearts. Healing. Truth. Just sentence fragments, because God knows how to fill in the blanks better than I do.

And I wondered about the weight of those instant prayers. Do they really do anything? They feel so effortless, just thoughts directed at God.

I turned off the highway and drove up the hill, noticing the patchy clouds in a grey sky. And His answer was right there: Some clouds are darker and heavier than others, some will drop rain sooner than others, but all carry a measure of water.

They all accumulate, contributing to the provision for those who are thirsty.

And, hey Love – answering prayer has never been about your efforts, anyway.

This is abiding, the thought-life directed Godward. Unpolished, unpretentious, unrehearsed. Our incomplete thoughts at scattered intervals, strung together and brought back to Him in surrender. Some of them are intercessory, filling the cloud for someone else. Others are internal, our own thoughts and concerns and desires, and they condense as Living Water that washes through us, irrigating our hearts, and bringing wholeness.  

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
    and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
    it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
    and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

– Isaiah 55:10-11

That night in our small group of women, we sat around a long table with steaming tea in paper cups and discussed the book we’re reading together. And we’re learning so much just from the reading, but we go so much farther when we hear each other’s perspectives and questions. We ignite thoughts in each other we didn’t know were there if they hadn’t had the chance to come up in conversation.

We notice more when we put our thoughts in different places. I didn’t know I thought that, until I said it out loud.

I didn’t realize that was true until I typed it out.

On the way home, rain spattered the windshield and rinsed the highway. It soaked the ground, and the leaves will be bigger tomorrow.

I thought trees were trees – that is, until the sky changed color behind them and they shook in the breeze, demanding me to take notice.

shining through: how we hope in the waiting

Posted on by September 24, 2021

I took half a dozen pictures of the sunset, and the few minutes between photos made them look like half a dozen different sunsets – gold, orange, fuchsia, purple, all the blues in the world.

shining through: how we hope in the waiting

And here’s the thing I learned about sunsets that night: The stuff that makes the colors visible is there all along. The molecules and particles that make those colors are there when the sun is high, but we just don’t see them. The sun has to get lower and lower – and then drop out entirely – before we see those amazing colors.

And if you feel like your light has gone out, you don’t have any answers, you’re out of ideas, and everything is threatening to go very dark, consider this:

Everything we need is still right here. God has unexpected color and answers and joy for you in this time, and He is positioning things so you can start to see them.

You, oh children of Light, are made brighter and more beautiful for all the dirt and clouds you’ve had to shine through.

Do not fear the darkness. The world is not going to drop out from under you. He has you firmly held. The sun is going to rise again soon. And He has more color to show you then, too.

In a season when I desperately needed color, the Lord led me to Luke 1:45, a verse I didn’t have memorized. And by “the Lord led me to it” I don’t mean I happened to stumble upon the verse while I was reading the book of Luke. I mean, it was a series of only-God-could-have-done-that coincidences that He made very obvious so I couldn’t possibly ignore them, and it spoke exactly to something I had been praying about.

Here it is:

And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.

— Luke 1:45

You can bet I’ve memorized the verse by now. And even now, He keeps bringing it up, asking me if I’ll keep believing for big things, trusting Him more than ever, regardless of what things look like.

Will I look to the gorgeous view? Or will I focus on the dirty window between me and that view — or on the warped reflection of what’s behind me?

Now is a time to be asking God for a bigger vision, for the next dream, for a clearer picture of the calling He’s placed on your life. This is a time for looking forward, not shrinking back.

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you,
    and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
    blessed are all those who wait for him.

– Isaiah 30:18

He waits, and we wait, and He blesses us for it. And I’m noticing here that He doesn’t ask us to do anything He hasn’t done Himself. 

What if our bad news, our bombshells, our curveballs, were really good news in the long run? What if they were really for our favor, on our behalf, and resulted in a smack in the face of the enemy?

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous,
but the Lord delivers him out of them all.

– Psalm 34:7, 17-19

He doesn’t have you stuck in the slow lane; you’re not stuck at all. He has you in a place of rest so He can move through you. Things are going on behind the scenes and under the surface that are in your favor, for your great joy. Just because you can’t see them yet doesn’t change the reality of their existence.

Whatever breakthrough you’ve been praying for, He hears you, He sees you, and He is working things out for your good, even (especially) when it’s hard.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

– Romans 8:28

God is a healer, deliverer, and beauty bringer, and we could not contain our excitement if we fully knew what He is up to in our situations. He is moving on our behalf, bringing justice, revival, and breakthrough as we surrender to Him.

So get in the Word, and get your hopes up.

The enemy feeds on fear and lies and despair. They’re practically his only weapons and they only work if people believe them. Hope brighter, stay in the Word, pray without ceasing. Those are unbeatable weapons, and the enemy is terrified of them.

These are days for learning more, loving deeply, praying hard, trusting God, leaning into scripture, practicing grace and repentance, forgiving and pressing on, discerning the times and asking for wisdom, speaking truth in love, and pushing through in obedience to the task in front of us.

These are not days to walk recklessly, impulsively, succumbing to our own knee jerk reactions, or to the pressure or enthusiasm of those without a plumb line for truth.

These are days to remember God is so very near to us, willing to speak and counsel, to correct and comfort, to bring hope and heal.

Just like every day. But we bear better fruit in these days when we remember it.

This is an excerpt from ABIDE volume two: Hope in the Waiting. You can find it here or anywhere books are sold.