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, ...

 "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." Ephesians 4:32 (ESV) Forgiveness is difficult by nature. But it isn't optional. Forgiveness isn’t something I’ve had the misfortune of struggling with for most of my life. There’s only a handful of people that have done anything to me that I really struggled to forgive, long term. The wounds that I’ve taken from those people are real though, no doubt. Some are more difficult to remember, but they're still proof of my humanity. They leave a scar to remind me how much I’ve changed over the years, like stretch marks that hold memories of the growing pains that God allowed me to feel. Some are more fresh, and I still wrestle with forgiveness to this day. They can be pretty haunting, like the enemy knows that they strike deep into my weakest points – because he does. There are a lot of different definitions of what forgiveness is, especially if you go from just a psychological pe...

 "For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day." 2 Corinthians 4:15-16 (ESV) I just wanted to use this post to be glad. I don't always feel it, but I'm so blessed to belong to Him. I know that a lot of what I write can be all about struggle, and it's true – there's a lot of sin in the world. God's grace is so much greater.  You'll notice that I actually started this blog back up in February. I had experienced feelings of rejection that, for whatever reason, were immediately followed by complete hope. I didn't understand it at the time, and I don't understand it still, but I felt so at peace – not necessarily peace with what I could see God doing, but peace in the confidence I had of who God was, is, and will continue to be. It's the closest I've eve...

 "For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead." James 2:26 (ESV) Accepting salvation is simple, but if we have no desire to grow in our faith, we might need to reevaluate whether we've really accepted it. I want to be careful with this one. Not just because it's taken out of context from people trying to undermine the authority of Scripture, but because I don't want to be hypocritical. So let me make it clear that the passage in James 2 that this comes from is not claiming that our salvation can come through works. We know that we're saved by grace alone, which reassures us that we're not capable of voiding our salvation either (Eph 2:8-9, and like everywhere else in the NT). I also want to make it clear that while this one has to be harsh, I'm not condemning anyone who's gotten stale in their faith. Regardless of whether my faith is alive or dead, sin gives me no right to pass unrighteous judgement on anyo...

"In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him." Ecclesiastes 7:14 (ESV) Preface This the conclusion of a series of posts on the nature of emotional pain, what it can reveal about our hearts and minds, and the purpose it has in our walk with Christ. If you want the full context, start from the  beginning . Conclusion and Personal Note I won't lie, when I started this series, I half-expected to suddenly have this new understanding of emotional pain that would allow me to never suffer it the same way again. I know how naive that sounds, but I think it's halfway true. What I've learned is that pain is simply the side effect that love gives us, because of sin. There is no love without pain. But that also means there's no pain, without love. When we hurt, it means that at some point, we were given the opportunity to love. When we'r...