Langdon's Devotional

Our prayers are a call, and we miss out on God's work when we're not patient enough to look for the response. Praying always feels like it has to have structure to me. And I think there's a right way to pray, but I'm not sure that there's really a wrong way to pray. Collective prayers are different, obviously. If you pray over someone or with someone, it's important that those people can reflect on that with you. But I think most of our prayers are individual, and still, it can feel challenging. I think it's possible that it doesn't feel that way because we're "bad" at praying, but because for us, the prayer stops once we open our eyes. A lot of us are just guilty of not looking for the answer. Or rather, not being patient enough to wait very long while we look for the answer. I don't think we're necessarily underestimating what God is capable of, but I think we have a hard time sitting in our faith of the Lord for a long period of...

cour·age / ˈkərij / noun strength in the midst of pain, grief, and/or fear . Defining Courage Most of us understand that courage is necessary to live a life for Christ. Some understand that it's necessary to live a life that's fulfilling to any degree. At the same time, courage is one of the most unnatural virtues to practice and develop. From combining more secular definitions, we can consider courage to be strength in the midst of pain , grief , and/or fear . In other words, having courage is considered the same as having strength, where our circumstances define whether or not we have the opportunity to be courageous. The strength aspect is something I wanna touch more on later, because the way we view true strength really matters. But the reason courage is so unnatural to us, is because the only time we get to put it into practice is when we're brought to face pain without relief, grief without comfort, and fear without security. By that definition, courage r...

grief /ɡrēf/ noun the anguish experienced as a result of a significant loss. Defining Grief Grief, by a more psychological standpoint, is the anguish experienced as a result of a significant loss . We attribute grief mostly to the death of a loved one. That's generally gonna be the source of the heaviest form of grief, but loss doesn't always mean death.  Let's break that definition down into the three defining parts. Anguish refers to severe mental pain or suffering. Pain is a pretty complicated concept on it's own, and you can refer to my series on pain to understand more about what it can tell us about our mental/emotional wounds. In short though, a good question to ask then, is when we feel all of the emotions that come with grief – which emotions are honest emotions? The word significant implies that it's had an impact on us – life looks different after we've lost the object of our grief. This is something that I'll go into more later. In short, ...