My favorite was yesternight.

Night is when I come alive. A bit less now that I’m balancing four kids’ schedules, but still, I’d rather stay up late than get up early.

Mornings are…not my favorite. (My kids and husband know not to interact with me until I’ve had some coffee and 10-15 minutes have safely passed.)

When my friend Jennifer Dukes Lee told me she was writing a book about mornings, my face probably said it all. (Sorry, JDL. I can’t fix my face sometimes.)

Mornings are just…not for me.

But I saw how she came alive when she talked about this manuscript. How she was poring over Scripture to find every single time mornings were mentioned. How she had the stubborn belief that somehow we all could be morning people. (It’s a stretch for me, ngl, but as I read her words, she may be convincing me otherwise.)

Could we all really be morning people? What about the ones waking up to something really heavy? The ones for whom morning dread isn't about a preference for sleeping in, but about the very harsh realities waiting on the other side of consciousness?

If that's you this week, you're in the right place.

When we were in South Carolina, I found myself voluntarily waking up to a sunrise, and I admit…the glory glistening on the water (almost) made a morning person out of me.

The largeness of the sky waking up to kiss the sea reminded me of my smallness and God’s bigness in the best kind of way.

How often do we get to watch the sun rise over the Ocean? If you’re a Midwesterner like me (and Jen) the answer is not often.)

Both Jennifer and I started our writing careers in journalism. In fact, we both were reporters for The Des Moines Register, but our time in the newsroom just missed each other! (Two women who would eventually write books about faith, coming up through the same building, just at different times? Wild!)

We were trained to write clearly and cleanly, which is probably why I often find myself gravitating toward reporter-turned-novelist Ernest Hemingway. (I know, so unique, right?) Whether or not you love his work, the way he wrote broke the literary world apart and ushered in a new style of writing—one that merged his reporting style with the art of storytelling.

His very first novel was The Sun Also Rises.

It’s not an inherently hopeful book, but the title holds the truth that no matter how awful things get, the sun will rise again.

No matter what we do or how much we achieve, the world keeps turning, held in the presence of our Creator.

And spoiler alert: Hemingway was not the first to coin this phrase.

I don’t often turn to the NKJV, but I have to admit, it is poetic:

“The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose."

Ecclesiastes 1:5

No matter how dark the night,1 the sun will rise again, reminding us of God’s faithfulness.

Ecclesiastes is a book that wrestles with the sometimes wearying cyclical nature of life.

The sun rises and sets and rises again…and what does it all amount to?

I went on a bit of a deep dive into this verse and found that, in the ancient Near Eastern context, the sun was worshiped as a deity. But these words in Ecclesiastes illuminated a brighter truth: the sun is created to serve God's purposes2.

Rising. Setting. Rising again.

The sun doesn't rise because it's divine. It rises because the One who made it is faithful. No matter how dark the night, the light comes back. The sun of each new day isn’t a cosmic accident or the whim of a temperamental deity. It’s the fingerprints of a God who keeps lighting the way.

Just like the season of spring whispers that new life is near, the setting sun is part of a sacred circle. Just like time. And God is the center.

As I share in Every Season Sacred:

As followers of Christ, we have the gift of marking our calendars with a different sort of time. We orient our year with the liturgical calendar, which walks us through the rhythms of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

We are no longer beholden to the marketplace, where we must consume our way into seasonal celebrations.

Christians across backgrounds, bloodlines, and borders enter this calendar with a larger understanding of God’s time, rooted in Christ instead of in the shifting sands of constantly refreshed endcaps at our favorite stores. We incorporate yearly rituals and rhythms, welcoming God into our homes and hearts.

As we enter this sacred circle of time, we worship and pray, celebrate and grieve. We read Scripture, practice traditions, and observe the work of Christ in us and around us. Year after year, we cycle through liturgical seasons, embarking on times of both contemplation and action.

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The sun rises. Mercy rises with it. And we keep muddling through somehow.

Thanks be to God, the circle holds. Even when we don't feel like we can hold it together for one more morning.

A Prayer for Morning

If you turn to the back of Every Season Sacred, you’ll find an appendix of daily prayers. I hope this “Prayer for Morning” is one you can turn to again and again.

“Daily prayer isn’t magic. It’s not a supernatural bandage for fixing wounds or ensuring that life will work out the way you hoped (or planned). But praying together can remind your family that all you do and all you are comes from God. And in the moments when we can barely find our footing, those glimmers of grace we sometimes glimpse when we pray can be downright sustaining.

The shortest of prayers (yes, even amid wailing babies, warring siblings, or wayward teenagers) can offer a moment of stability. Praying together can remind your family that as you embark on different paths in our beautiful, heartbreaking world, your roots connect in Christ.”

O God of hope, we thank You

For the breath in our lungs

And the gift of a new day.

As surely as the sun rises,

Your mercy covers the earth.

We ask You to help us start fresh

As we embark on the adventures

You have for us.

May all the people we meet today

Know us by our love.

May all the things we do today

Be in worship to You.

Thank You for the gift

Of another morning

On Your big, beautiful earth.

Where there is pain,

May we bring healing.

Where there is suffering,

May we bring hope.

Be with each of us

As we go about the day.

And when the day is done,

Bring us home safely

Under the shelter of Your wings.

Amen.

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A Blessing for Your Morning

from To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers and Liturgies for Parents

Bless the late nights

And the too-early mornings.

Bless the daily chaos

And the quiet moments, too.

Get more prayers!

How to Love Your Morning

Despite your best intentions, mornings can be stressful and chaotic before your feet even hit the floor. Your thoughts spiral and hope feels just out of reach. You long to wake up with joy and energy, believing that God's mercies really are new every morning, but you aren't sure how.

Drawing on every morning described in the Bible (yep, she's studied every single one!), How to Love Your Morning helps you discover your morning archetype, examine your rhythms, develop a fresh morning mindset, create a personalized morning ritual, and adopt habits that lead to flourishing.

With reflective questions and practical advice, this is your invitation to create a morning routine that fits your real life so you can experience God's mercies new every morning.

Morning by Morning, Mourning by Mourning

an excerpt from How to Love Your Morning by Jennifer Dukes Lee

There are some things they don’t teach you in school or church. Like, how to be a daughter on the first morning you wake up in a world without your dad.

Dad died as the sun was setting over the lake outside his bedroom window. My hand was on his chest, and I could feel his heart—his old heart, his good heart—drumming lightly, haltingly through his T-shirt. I kept my palm pressed gently on his chest to find evidence of what little life lingered in him. I caught myself, at once, willing Dad to go and begging God to let him stay a bit longer. But his heart did what a heart does at the end of a good, long life: it slowed and slowed, the way a ticking metronome slackens when you turn down the dial little by little.

And then, after eighty-four years of living, Dad’s heart beat its last.

I looked at Dad. I looked at Mom. I looked at the clock. The sun went down on Dad’s earthly life at 7:44 p.m. One minute later, the sun outside his bedroom window slipped under the horizon.

The sun fell that night and rose the next day—morning light scattering the night. I woke up to a world that was altogether different and yet the same.

It happens like that some mornings, doesn’t it? Day’s first light leaks through your curtains, and your eyes pop open to a new day.

Once you move past the fog of waking up, you feel a pit in your stomach.

It’s the kind of morning dread you might have felt after your own loss—of a person, a pet, a dream, a job, a freedom, a decent night’s sleep, or the good health you once took for granted.

And let’s face it, it’s not always the capital B Bad things that make you pull the covers back over your head. Some mornings you’re simply dealing with a low-grade malaise and lack of motivation. Or maybe you anticipate the bad news that has been pinging in your mobile-phone notifications. Perhaps you’ve woken up to a wild rumpus of noisy little people who demand your help on the other side of your bedroom door.

Equally hard? Waking up when the people you’ve loved fiercely aren’t waiting on the other side of the door anymore.

On a morning like that, some bit of dread rides on the morning’s happy sunbeams.

I’ve woken up feeling all of those things.

After Dad died, mornings felt like an alarm set by a broken heart.

I realize there’s nothing “tragic” about an eighty-four-year-old man, who lived a long, good life, graduating to heaven. Some of you reading these words have woken to far more devastating losses.

Even so, loss is loss. Grief is grief. Any kind of sorrow can make a morning pretty rough. For me, losing my dad was my first real experience with grief at such a deep level. His absence was palpable, morning by morning. And, mourning by mourning.

Amidst the reality of awful mornings, let’s not miss this: a morning can become a sweet time to mark new beginnings when you believe afresh that God’s mercies are new, sure as the sun rises. Mornings are a series of little births, little resurrections.

Every spin of Earth’s axis is another genesis, tinted with hope. There’s nothing more beautiful than the loveliness of the eastern horizon just before the sun domes above that mesmerizing line of land.

When faced with the brevity of life, will we squander these precious little births born at daybreak? What if morning could be something to savor, even on a most ordinary day? Is it possible to look forward to waking up to life, to love each morning as an unrepeatable gift to unwrap? Dare we hope with expectation that our mornings ahead won’t just be bearable, but beautiful?

After Dad passed away, mornings came and went. Seasons changed. Leaves dropped. Snow fell. Spring bloomed. Sun blazed. And in those months, I found comfort in the way that God gave us this cyclical world with hope built into the fabric of it—where “weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5).

Morning by morning, a simple yet foundational truth began to dawn on me: As long as we are alive, God gives us new mornings, every day. New do-overs, every day.

New chances to move forward, every day. New opportunities to make reparations, to seek restoration, to rebuild what was broken. Every single day.

Each new day carried me a step farther from the night of Dad’s last heartbeat, yet at the same time, a growing awareness about the significance of mornings rose within me, over the horizon of my soul.

Mornings were saving me, reminding me, day by day, that God’s mercies rise with the sun.

Morning Playlist

Last week, we explored space (themes). Since we’re exploring mornings this week, I thought I’d share the playlist NASA made to wake up the astronauts on Artemis II.

I find myself singing Good Morning to my kids (after coffee, of course) and I thought it was sweet that NASA included it on the playlist!

Paid subscribers will get a morning playlist I curated just for this week!

A Rhythm of Faith

Sometimes you need something to carry into Monday morning—a breath prayer for when the alarm goes off and dread rides in on the sunbeams, a reflection question that meets you in the fog before coffee, a playlist for the slow waking-up kind of days.

That’s what the Year of Breath paid section of this newsletter is for. (It also helps me feed my children and provide scholarships to any reader who needs one!)

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Breath Prayer for the Week

Monday

INHALE: Your mercies are new

Read more

As our guest today reminds us, Easter is far from over—it actually stretches across fifty days on the Church calendar.

Just as Lent is a season for reflection and going without, the season that follows is a space for new life, new hope, and new joy nestled into the crevices of our actual lives.

Grab your coffee.

We're living Easter together.

A Prayer for Easter

from page 158 of To Light Their Way

We praise You on this Easter morning
With glad and grateful hearts,
Eager to shout Your glory.

Death could not hold You.
Sin could not destroy You.
For You are God
And worthy of every praise!

O Jesus, You continue to make a way
Where there is no way.
As we celebrate Your resurrection power,
We pray our children
Would sing and dance
In the promise that we are Easter people
And we have a living hope in You.

May our children
Bask in the truth
That You have conquered sin and death,
And may that living hope
Spill into all they do, all they meet, all they are.

Lord, You know us by name,
And You do not forget us
Or forsake us.
May our children proclaim Your goodness,
And may they feel Your graciousness.
Shine upon their faces
Like the spring dawn breaking through.

In the empty tomb,
We are given life—
And life abundant!
All the jelly beans and dyed eggs,
Baskets and bunnies
Pale in comparison to You.

O Prince of Peace, we celebrate on this day.
As we eat and gather around the table,
May we remember those who are lonely,
Those who have none to feast with
Or share their table with.
As we eat and gather around the table,
May we remember those who cannot afford
To fill their cupboards.

As we eat and gather around the table,
May we remember those whose lives
Have been marked by violence.
As we eat and gather around the table,
May we pray for all those who are unsafe
In sharing their faith.

As we go out into the world,
May our family live in a way
That proclaims the Good News—
Good news for the poor,
Good news that sets the captive free.
O God, the tomb could not hold You.
Fill our family with a love
That is shared between us
And freely given to everyone we meet.
The earth declares Your glory.

All of creation praises Your name.
And our hearts cry out, “Hallelujah!”
We praise You, O Lord,
As we throw off the sin and the shame of yesterday.
Let us dance in the promise of the new morning
Of today and tomorrow and forevermore!

Get more prayers!

The Fullness of God’s Love

From page 183 of Every Season Sacred

God’s love pursues us.

As we reflect on the season of Lent and Easter, we see the most outstanding picture
of God’s love in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Colossians 2:9 says, “In Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body.”

In Christ, we find a love that holds a flashlight, finding us in the darkest night.
In Christ, we find a love that transcends time and space to bring us safely home.
In Christ, we find a love that chases us even when there’s an ache in His side from running toward us (see John 19:34).

In Christ, we find the fullness of God’s love.

52 Reflections for Every Season

Cultivating Easter Joy

Living Easter

I’ve shared with you that is one of my favorite writers, and it’s true! She has a brand-new book that I wish I could send to each one of you. (Keep reading…one of you is getting a free copy!)

As the most significant season of the Church year, Easter deserves to be lived well and celebrated fully, and few voices speak more compellingly about Christian joy than , celebrated author and creator of The Holy Labor newsletter and the platform.

“Living Easter celebrates joy itself as our Resurrection practice,” Fanucci writes. “Taking up joy as a daily discipline teaches us about feasting as a companion practice to fasting: an intentional sacred act that draws us closer to God.”

Special for us: 20% off a copy!

Laura’s publisher is offering us 20 percent off if you use the code CRAIG20 when you place your order, or you use this link. I’m grateful to partner with Ave Maria Press for this wonderful deal…definitely don’t miss it!

What’s Inside

Just open to the day’s reading and reflection, no preparation required.

• Read a passage from the gospels or Acts of the Apostles about Jesus’s Resurrection.

• Ponder a thoughtful reflection that will change the way you think about these foundational stories.

• Follow a heartfelt and brief prayer prompt.

• Take up a daily call-to-action, ranging from ideas for what you might eat or wear during Easter to lively ways that you can practice joy in your interactions with others.

Each week ends with a longer essay, which breaks open the experiences of Jesus’s mother, Mary, and the bewildered disciples, beholding the wonder of Christ’s first appearances after his death and burial.

Whether engaged in solitary meditation or shared in a group study, it will form your mind, heart, and soul in the abundance of the One whose love broke open the grave.

“Living Easter” Book Giveaway!

I loved Living Easter so much that I wanted to put a copy in your hands.

We're giving away a copy to one paid subscriber this week—just drop a comment below about what resonated with you from this week, and you're entered.

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On Joy

an adapted excerpt from Living Easter by

Mary Magdalene turning to hear her name. Thomas seeing with his own eyes. Peter jumping into the water, rushing to shore. Mary meeting her Son for the first time after death. The women discovering an empty tomb. The disciples at Emmaus breaking bread with a stranger. Everyone in the upper room receiving the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The stories of Easter in Scripture ring out with joy.

Surprise, doubt, fear, shock, hope, and questions, too—but always a deep, abiding joy running beneath every Resurrection story. In the moment when each of Jesus’s disciples realizes what has happened, a joy is born unlike anything the world has known before.

Take Mary Magdalene’s stunning proclamation: “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). Her words could be spoken by everyone who encountered the Risen Christ in the Gospels, but also by each one of us—every follower of Jesus who wants to understand what Easter means for our lives today.

Two thousand years ago on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene’s words changed the world. Heart pounding, feet racing, she ran to share the Good News that had broken into her life, and her joy is still ringing in our ears, centuries later, because the Resurrection transformed everything.

How can we keep celebrating Christ’s rising and all the goodness it brings to our lives?

Lent drops us off at the doorway of Easter.

We stand here, peering into the empty tomb with hearts pounding.

Tired from the long road behind us after forty days of fasting and the passion of Holy Week, we think we know what comes next.

We are ready for Resurrection.

But what does it mean to live Easter?

Living Easter celebrates joy itself as our Resurrection practice. Through small, everyday actions, we can live out the full season of fifty days—enlivened by our prayer and reflection on Scripture.

Taking up joy as a daily discipline teaches us about feasting as a companion practice to fasting: an intentional sacred act that draws us closer to God.

The poet Mary Oliver wrote that “joy was not made to be a crumb.”

Feasting on joy for fifty days, we savor the goodness of the Resurrection, knowing that it transforms everything.

The Easter season is longer than Lent, brighter than Advent, and bursting with more alleluias than every other season combined.

Each year we are invited to rediscover what it means to enter into resurrection and be changed by joy. If you have always celebrated Easter but want to deepen your relationship with God through these fifty days, now is the time to try a new practice of feasting, prayer, and joy.

Easter is God’s abundant yes to life, and Easter is for all to enjoy.

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Year of Breath

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But…the paid Year of Breath edition is where we slow all the way down. Together.

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Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday
INHALE: Joy is not a crumb

Read more

No armor.

No army.

Just a donkey and a love that was already moving toward the cross.

He could have done it differently. He had every right to.

I wrote this poem while working on my new book, and even though it didn’t make the final cut, I keep coming back to it. He didn’t leave us in our war.

He chose us instead.

The Could Haves

You could have
Rode in on a dark horse
Like a warrior
And they would have celebrated.

You could have
Demanded dominance
Commanded the stars dance
And they would have.

You could have
Left us
In our war.

Holy Week Reading Guide

Reading Plan For April 2026

239KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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If Holy Week tends to feel more frantic than holy, we have something for you.

The April 2026 Reading Plan moves through the whole arc of Holy Week, day by day, with reflections from Every Season Sacred and prayers from To Light Their Way. Palm Sunday. Maundy Thursday. Good Friday. Holy Saturday. Easter. And then all the way through Eastertide, because the resurrection deserves more than one Sunday morning.

Print it, prop it by your coffee maker, save it on your phone…use it in a way that makes sense to you.

The Circle

from pages 164-168 of Every Season Sacred

The pastors dip into the ash and oil, smudging the shape of the cross. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust, you shall return.” The children trot down the aisle, waving their palm branches. “Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest!”

The Christian life is one of death unto life, life unto death.

When we observe holy days such as Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday, we’re reminded year after year of the circular rhythms of life in Christ.

A number of Christian denominations collect the palm fronds waved by little ones on Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter, which observes the Triumphal Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem) and burn them down to dirt and dust for the following year’s observation of Ash Wednesday (an introspective holy day that begins the season of Lent, inviting believers to reflect on their mortality and their need for Christ).

The circle repeats, moving us through a loop of life unto death, death unto life.

Lush green leaves that once danced in the breeze become gritty gray ashes—a tangible picture of Jesus’ sacrificial, life-giving love for us. This love flips our understanding of mortality upside down.

We lose our lives to gain them (see Matthew 16:25).

Jesus died so we may live (see John 10:10).

Lent invites us into a time of pulling weeds and pruning the wilted parts of our lives so we may grow more into the people God created us to be.

We let parts of ourselves die so we can have a more abundant life.

I never gave a second thought to inviting my children to grab a palm frond, their light-up sneakers adding to the joyful procession as they paraded down the church aisle on Palm Sunday. But the thought of bringing my kids to a family Ash Wednesday service made me shudder.

They’re too young for that somberness, I thought.

But are they?

Palm Sunday is a bittersweet day of remembrance. Yes, we celebrate the way Jesus subverted His culture’s notions of power and prestige, riding into town on a donkey as the true God of the people. These were the same people who laid palm branches on the road before him in an act of welcome, blessing the One who came in the name of the Lord, shouting “Hosanna!” (see Matthew 21:8-9).

It’s a beautiful picture. But this is only part of the sacred circle of the Christian life.

At the Palm Sunday service, after the palm procession, the tone changes. It goes from a “joyful celebration of Jesus’ triumphal entry to the sorrowful remembrance of His passion.”

The cycle repeats: life unto death, death unto life.

52 Reflections for You

A Prayer for Palm Sunday

from page 151 of To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers & Liturgies for Parents

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

O Jesus, who rode in on a donkey,
Subverting again
Our ways of the world,
May we forever praise Your name
As our children wave palm branches
To welcome You in—
A parade of chubby hands
Gripping branches,
A chorus of little voices giggling,
A procession of tiny feet skipping,
Welcoming us to say, “Hosanna!
Blessed is the One
Who comes in the name of the Lord!”

We give You all the glory
And all the honor,
And we praise Your name
With the joy of a little child
Eager to join a parade,
Excited to catch the eye of Mom or Dad
As they make their way in worship.
Let us lift our lives in praise to You.

Let us sing unashamed, like children,
Throwing off the insecurities
That come with age
And laying them at Your feet.

Let our lives be anthems of Your love
As we enter the chorus
Of all who have gone before us,
Lifting the works of our hands
And the words of our hearts
To You, O Lord.

Enter our hearts and home.
Enter our family and our very lives,
O Lord, even as we praise You.

We know we are capable
Of the unimaginable,
And we sit in the tension
Of what is to come.

Will You prepare our hearts, O Lord,
And the hearts of our children
To remember
That these branches we hold,
The ones we cut down,
Will be made into ashes?
Will You remind us that a life in You
Is a life that holds rhythms
Of jubilant celebration
And also sorrow and suffering?

O Lord, there is none but You.
We worship You on this day
And forevermore.

Get More Prayers

Small Steps: Blessings to Lift Your Soul on the Pilgrimage of Life

I’m so grateful to share that a member of our own community here, , has a new book coming out that feels just for us!

Small Steps: Blessings to Lift Your Soul on the Pilgrimage of Life includes blessings and essays all based on the belief that each of us can offer words of goodness and hope to others.

From Kimberly:

Every night, as my children lie in bed, I make the sign of the cross over them and remind them that they are loved by God.

When I don’t have any other words, and I’m exhausted from the day’s tasks or feeling like I’m failing as a parent, marking the cross on their foreheads is an act of resistance for me. Resistance against feeling like my work doesn’t matter. The sign of the cross reminds me of my call, both as a mother and as a beloved child of God.

In blessing my children, I’m relying on a centuries-old tradition that conveys the power of God’s presence, following in the footsteps of generations. Neither my children nor I are alone. The words become a way to share the gift of God’s presence with myself and them.

The blessings in Small Steps are meant to share God’s presence with you, as they meet you in your real life. Your everyday, nitty-gritty, down-in-the-dirt, dishes-piled-in-the-sink, appointment-scheduling, carpool-waiting, caring-for-family-and-friends life. Your life as it is. In all the joys and challenges. In the moments when you’d rather stay inside, block out the news, and retreat with only your family. In the hours you spend putting one tired foot in front of the other.

My hope for readers of Small Steps is that they will feel the words wash over them. That they will then go and offer blessings to someone else. Seeing the words multiply and scatter. Hearing the hum of God’s presence in every word: You are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone.

For blessings aren’t meant to be kept to ourselves.

Book Giveaway!

Thanks to ’s generosity, we have not one, but two of her books to giveaway!

One reader will receive a copy of her new book Small Steps: Blessings to Lift Your Soul on the Pilgrimage of Life and another will recieve her fantastic first book The Beauty of Motherhood (which I endorsed!).

To enter, simply pop in a comment about one small way you’ll be observing Easter this year! (Must be able to receive mail in the US.)

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These giveaways are small tokens of thanks to the paid supporters of this weekly newsletter. We’d love to have you join us. When you join, you unlock 100+ archives of breath prayers, reflection questions, weekly playlists, and more. AND you support scholarships for those who need them. AND you help me feed my three growing boys who apparently eat ten meals and six snacks a day!

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A Blessing for Palm Sunday

by

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

It’s time to wave the palms
and walk to Jerusalem,
we know the story and where we’re heading
but we’re already facing so many deaths
so much loss and uncertainty,
do we need more?

Let us toss down our coats
our apathy
our self-righteousness
and our own plans
to seek the common good.

We’re marching to Jerusalem,
but also to the neighbors across the street
the jail across the ocean
to war-torn Palestine and Ukraine
to the halls of our Capitol.

Give us humbleness
may we turn over peace
again and again
until all people can shout,
blessed is He who comes
blessed are we
the free.

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Year of Breath

Keep reading for:

• Breath Prayers for the Week

• Scripture for the Week

• Reflection Questions for the Week

• Playlist for the Week

• Practice for the Week

• Wallpaper for the Week

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Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday
INHALE: You hold me

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Her new book, Counterweights, is for so many of us who feel worn-down in these heavy times in this heavy world.

I’m just a few chapters in, and I think I’ve resonated with her words so much because they remind me that caring about compassion and justice—doing what we can to make our neighborhoods, communities, and world more whole—is not separate from the beauty we seek (or the thrift store treasures we delight in).

It’s easy to slip into the idea that Lent is a season for no joy.

But Lent helps us clear away the brush so we can notice the small green shoots pushing through the earth. It invites us to reconnect with what gives us hope, so we have the strength to keep going in a weary world.

Counterweights releases Tuesday. As you may have heard me (or any other author) share before, preorder sales are a ginormous deal in the publishing world. So if this is a book you’ve been wanting, I encourage you to grab a copy now. (I think the heart of this book aligns closely with the heart of my new book that will release this falll…more on that later.)

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Holding Hope in a Heavy World

an excerpt from Counterweights by

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet. My dad, Dwight Garber, is not.

Rilke, born in nineteenth-century Germany, was known for his mastery of language and his precision with a poet’s tools. My dad, born in 1951 to German Baptist parents and raised on the edge of a river in rural Ohio, has never known a stranger and is a master of everything I’ve ever watched him do.

A lifelong laborer with the leathery neck to prove it, my dad can’t locate a Rilkean meter if his life depended on it, but he can do trigonometry in his head. Across his lifetime he has built everything from ranch-style homes to four-lane bridges to an ornate waterbed that made him small-town famous in the late 1980s. But before all of that, at the age of nineteen he fell in love with a Catholic girl, and together they built a third way across religious expectations and cultural norms.

I don’t exactly know what Dad thinks about beauty, but he grows the prettiest garden in Miami County and mows his two acres on the bias, taking care along the row of flowering pear trees like a good dad does. When I called him on his most recent birthday, well past sunset in November, we chatted for a few minutes before he drew out his customary, “Wellllll,” and said he’d better get back to his moonlight mowing sesh.

No surprise, the faith tradition that raised and sustained him has left him with indelible marks. Decades ago, when my mom had a breast cancer scare, he chicken-scratched KJV Bible verses onto scraps of paper and taped them around the house. He keeps a wary distance from political rivals, with me as his most notable exception. I’ve seen the smoke rings of scarcity stretch and disperse across his lifetime, nudging him to shore up reserves, to always be prepared. I can’t imagine him describing any of this as “terror,” but he has quietly carried his share of trials just like the rest of us.

Rilke and Dad, these men from different eras and clashing timelines, unknowable in unique ways, have somehow conspired to teach me that the human task of remaining upright in a dizzying world can be distilled into a single line of instruction.

We must learn to carry the cosmos.

True abundance is not just the good stuff. We get it all. Every drop, every dreg—the good, the terrible, the “Who even knows?” That’s the deal.

Daily life proves to be a bit too much. It’s too frantic, too full, too bruising for our tender hearts. It contains more beauty, more delight, more awe, and more eccentricity than we can possibly hold, but we’re willing to strain our arms and hearts trying.

This, I have come to believe, is the “abundant life” we were promised. We get it all.

When a famous mustachioed poet and a modern everyday man who wore his name stitched across the pocket of his uniform agree on something, it’s wise to pay attention. Rilke’s vision for bearing abundance lands more on the metaphysical side. Dwight Garber’s version is as practical as a Midwestern storm shelter.

I don’t know about you, but I could use some no-nonsense dad advice these days, as time feels like a skipping record, logic is inverted, and history keeps doubling back on itself.

When will the madness stop? How can we possibly endure the endless burn of bad news and hold the hefty, human weight of everyday goodness?

Dwight Garber from Pleasant Hill, Ohio, with his diesel truck and leather tool belt, shiny with use, has the answer. From the time my siblings and I were small, he taught us that carrying something heavy becomes more efficient, more doable, if we carry something equally heavy in the other hand. If memory serves me, Dad’s unwritten textbook applied this rule to carrying everything from cement blocks to wood for the fireplace to buckets of grain for livestock.

Applied to most life situations, this theory of balance doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Few things are ever truly equally balanced. But it’s hard to argue with the laws of physics. Distributing the load as evenly as possible keeps us moving forward, rather than lurching to one side and potentially tipping over.

As it turns out, I was never well-suited for farm life or math. I was made for metaphor. I took what my dad handed me and carried it with both hands straight into the blood-rush of my one, exhausting, exhilarating life. I heaved it into my quiet corner of this dizzying world. Who’s to say the rules of farm-life and physics can’t also apply to the daily labor of living?

If our grand plan is to find a way to keep going, the answer is to double up on the weight. Redistribute the weight. Get back to work.

About the Book

It's easy to wish things were different—to with the world didn't feel so heavy, to wish we didn't feel so powerless. We have this sense that there is a better life, a better world out there, just around the bend. But this is our actual life, and it mostly falls somewhere between the terrible and the sublime—ordinary hours crammed with small griefs and pops of joy.

We move through our days with one fist full of possibility and the other clutching panic. And we only get to do this once, so we want to make it count.

What can we do—today—to remain upright and hopeful through it all?

If you're feeling rattled, overwhelmed, or burned out, Counterweights is your invitation to take charge of what you can. Notice beauty. Carve out some comfort. Lean into the mundane moments and quirky rhythms that help you remember what you love about life, in all its dazzling chaos. Every counterweight you collect along the way tips the scales toward wholeness and resilient joy.

Borrow this Prayer

from “A Prayer for Spring” in Every Season Sacred

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

O God of all seasons,
We thank You for the hope
Ushered in by spring.

After a long winter,
We ache for the newness of life.
We give thanks for the firstfruits
Of a new season—
The sprouts of green
Pushing through the earth,
Reminding us
You were working all along,
Even when things felt dark—
Perhaps even dead.

We thank You for the daylight returning
And, with it, a renewed promise
That we are never alone.

Thank You for the return of robins
That hop and frolic,
Inviting us into playful
Rhythms of grace.

We see You in the spring showers
And the mud puddles
Made for tiny feet to jump in.
We hear You in the trill of the bird’s song
And the fragrant blooms of lilacs
That seem to emerge overnight.

After the austerity of winter
Comes the jubilation of spring—
Help us to remember that
You care for the lily
And the sparrow,
And the depths of Your compassion
Stretch deep around our family, too.

Thank You for the invitation
To quiet our souls during
The season of Lent.

Reveal in us
Where we have lost our way
So we may return every part
Of our bodies and souls
To You.

Help us to enter into reflection
So we may see the face of Christ
More fully in the round, rosy cheeks
Of a sleeping baby,
The missing-tooth grin
Of a mischievous child,
The tousled bed head
Of a moody teen.

Help us to remember that spring always comes
And that we do not parent
As people without hope.

Turn our mourning into dancing.
Breathe in us new hope
So we may offer that hope
To the hurting people
And places around us.

Turn our grief into celebration.
Help us to shed our winter skin
And live into the newness of life
You’ve called us to.

As we plunge our hands into fresh dirt,
We plant our summer hopes
And know that You turn
Seeds of faith
Into something beautiful.

Spring Playlist

ICYMI: I make playlists for all the sections in my books. Open those windows and breathe in the newness of spring! (If you like playlists…you should subscribe to the paid version of this newsletter. You’ll get a new curated playlist every week! And unlock more than 100 playlists from the archives!)

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Words to Hold

A Small (BIG) Way You Can Help

One tiny way you can support my writing is by opening this newsletter on Susbtack and simply tapping the heart button. So grateful for your support—thank you to all who took the time to click that button last week. It sounds weird, but it really does help! Thank you! :) There may just be some more giveaways in the future!

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Year of Breath

Spiritual formation isn’t for navel gazers. It’s for all of us, right here in the midst of our actual lives.

Keep reading for:

• Breath Prayers for the Week

• Scripture for the Week

• Reflection Questions for the Week

• Playlist for the Week

• Practice for the Week

• Wallpaper for the Week

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Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday
INHALE: Help me notice

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They not only invited me to be the guest speaker but also went above and beyond by inviting my whole family to join. It was such a gift to get to make memories with all four of our kids. It was also the first time my kids had seen me do the speaking part of my work.

I was deeply touched by their inclusion and generosity, and energized by the multigenerational, multidenominational, multiracial worship. There’s just nothing like hearing people in the congregation shout Amen!

The intentionality they put into making spiritual formation and spiritual practices accessible for real-life families left Jonny and me feeling so encouraged.

It was an honor to get to share my stories and God’s Word with them.

Our theme verse was 2 Colossians 6-7:

So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

2026 Speaking: I’d love to join you!

If your university, church, organization, conference, or retreat is looking for a speaker, please reach out!

Planning something for 2026? I’d love to see if there are ways we can connect! I speak about spiritual formation in real life and share honest hope for experiencing God’s presence in our weary world.

Let's Connect!

Podcast Alert!

What if the most powerful place for spiritual growth is not a classroom or church program—but the home?

Campbell University Divinity School has announced the launch of the Empowering Families Podcast, a new tool designed to equip parents and caregivers with practical resources, biblical insight, and real-life support to help children grow in their faith.

They did not ask me to share…but it felt too good not to share with you!

Grounded in the belief that faith takes root in the everyday rhythms of home life, the podcast extends the Empowering Families initiative's work beyond church activities and retreats. Each episode features trusted voices—educators, ministry leaders, and parents—sharing practical, approachable ways to nurture faith at home.

“Through this podcast, we hope to empower parents and caregivers with confidence, knowledge and hope as they faithfully nurture the love of Christ in their families,” said Dr. Sarah Boberg, director of Empowering Families at the Divinity School.

Rather than adding another program to busy schedules, the podcast helps families recognize and cherish the opportunities already present in everyday moments—around dinner tables, during car rides and in bedtime routines.

Good Fruit

from pages 211-214 of Every Season Sacred

“WALK WITH PURPOSE!” our professor shouts, leaving a trail of journalism students in her wake as we make our way through Manhattan crowds.

I do my best to keep up, craning my neck to take in the skyscrapers I’ve only seen in movies. I breathe in the gorgeous sights (and not-so-pleasant smells) of New York City and try to match my professor’s brisk pace. Hordes of people push in all directions. I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

I’m not in Iowa anymore, I think to myself as I pick up my pace.

Our speed of life ebbs and flows over the course of our lives, but it isn’t sustainable to move at high speed nonstop. Whether you live in Midtown or the Midwest, eventually you have to embrace a slower pace.

When we become parents—bathing babies and helping with homework—we’re often forced to slow our steps, to reorient ourselves to a new way of understanding time.

Modern life demands that we move fast, and it has a way of warping our understanding of God’s time—and God’s love. How can we fathom a love that is patient if we never slow down?

Kids have much to teach us about growing in patience. My children, who usually have nonstop energy, tend to move in slow motion when it’s time to leave the house. While they sometimes test our patience, kids also help us imagine a life that isn’t on-demand.

They move through the world to their own rhythms, distracted by a butterfly landing on the car, mesmerized by a bunny hopping through the yard.

Kids tend to have a healthier relationship with time than most adults do.

We grown-ups consume productivity apps, time hacks, and best practices. We track our efficiency and our accomplishments. As much as we say kids are impatient, we tend to be the ones who are always shouting, “Hurry up!”

We want things now, whether it’s coffee at the press of a button, breaking news with the refresh of an app, or immediate obedience when we ask our kids to stop wrestling and put on their shoes so we won’t be late.

Our high-speed culture offers an insidious question: Who needs faith when our fast-moving world can meet every want and need (even the wants and needs we didn’t know we had)?

Scripture is chock-full of gardening and farming metaphors, and I wonder if that’s because gardeners and farmers deeply understand time. They know the discipline of patience; the work of their hands requires it. No matter how productive and efficient they may be, they can’t make plants grow simply by demanding them to.

Growth takes time.

Just as the natural seasons change, the Holy Spirit guides us through the dead of winter into the new life of spring—over and over again.

In the New Testament, James tells followers of Christ to be patient in their faith, to learn from the way farmers wait in the rhythms of spring planting and autumn harvesting.

“See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains,” he writes (James 5:7, niv).

Family Discussion Questions

Choose a few (or just one if that’s all you have margin for) to use as a jumping off point for connection this week. You know your family best, so choose what feels most doable and appropriate.

• Patience is a fruit of the Spirit. What do you think it means to be patient?

• Think of someone you know who is patient. How does that trait show up in their life?

• What happens to a race car that drives fast without refueling?

• Why do you think God cares if we’re patient?

• Do you know someone who has a farm or a garden? What do you think would be some of the challenges of that kind of work?

• Have you ever planted something from a seed? What happened?

• What is something that you’ve had to wait a long time for? What was it like to wait?

• Do you feel like you move too slowly? Too fast? Why do you think that is?

• In what ways could we slow down our daily or weekly schedules?

• How do we know that the Holy Spirit is working in our lives?

A Small (BIG) Way You Can Help

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Year of Breath

Spiritual formation doesn’t have to be complicated. Keep reading for:

• Breath Prayers for the Week

• Scripture for the Week

• Reflection Questions for the Week

• Playlist for the Week

• Practice for the Week

• Wallpaper for the Week

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Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday

INHALE: Root me in you.

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I raise an eyebrow and reach for the zipper.

“No, wait!” he says, throwing his hand over the brimming bag he slings over his shoulder every day after school. “You can’t see what’s inside yet. Just see if you can actually lift it.” I grab the bag and lift it with one hand. It doesn’t feel especially heavy.

“Mom!” he shouts. “How did you do that? It’s so heavy!” he insists.

He grabs the bag and slowly unzips it for the big reveal: a massive algebra textbook. He looks at me expectantly. I stare back, unsure of what reaction he’s hoping for. “Can you believe my teacher wants us to lug around a giant book?” he exclaims.

Before I launch into a speech that begins with, “Back in my day,” I stifle my laughter. He’s part of a generation that rarely carries physical books anymore. For him, almost everything lives on a slim, lightweight tablet, not in a backpack bursting at the seams.

“Wow,” I say, sipping my coffee. “That is a heavy burden.”

He nods solemnly.

It’s been years since I carried a heavy backpack from class to class, but even as we age out of math homework, finals, and prom dates, we never really stop carrying heavy things. The grown-up world comes with its own set of weights—many of them invisible, shouldered day after day.

What are you carrying these days, tucked away in your own invisible backpack?

What are you carrying that was never meant to be yours alone? Guilt that grows heavier with time? Insecurities that began long ago and never loosened their grip? Anxiety that keeps you braced for the next shoe to drop? The constant pressure to hold it all together, even when you feel like you’re unraveling?

What if, just for a moment, you set a few things down? How might you finally be able to catch your breath if you could just let yourself rest from carrying it all?

In Matthew 11:28, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He speaks these words to people exhausted not only by life itself but by the weight of religious rules layered on top of Roman occupation.

Jesus’ call to get away and discover real rest is so gentle it’s almost, well, radical. He doesn’t tell people that if they’re weary, they should add another religious requirement to their to-do list. He doesn’t hand anyone a rulebook or chastise them for being too stressed or worn down.

Jesus notices our fatigue and says, You look tired. Let me carry some of that for you.

So many of us have picked up the idea that if we don’t hold everything together, it will all fall apart.

We carry responsibilities at work and at home, bear the emotional and physical labor of caring for others, and endure the heavy fears that arise only when we lie down at night.

When everything falls away, and strivings cease, Jesus meets us with care and compassion. Jesus invites us to let go of the weight that was never ours to carry alone. When our shoulders are full of religious rules and regulations, how much space do we have to experience the expansive love of Christ? The grace of Jesus frees us from feeling like we need to earn our way to true rest.

As Lent begins, maybe God is inviting us to notice what we’ve been carrying for too long, and to let some of it rest for a while.

What have you been carrying in your invisible backpack for so long that it almost feels like part of you? How long has it been there? Who handed it to you? When did it start to feel normal, maybe even necessary, to keep carrying this weight?

The way of Jesus is not crushing or cruel. His yoke is easy. His burden is light.

When the weight you carry feels like too much to bear, remember Peter’s words:

“Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

Borrow this Breath Prayer

INHALE: Your burden
EXHALE: Is light

Release what was never yours to carry. Let the One who gives each breath carry you.

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Now and Not Yet

from page 171 of Every Season Sacred

While forty days of Lent may not sound like much, it often feels much longer.

We’re in the now and not yet.

Here in the Midwest, Lent aligns with the seasonal ailments and elements of early spring. Trees are barren; skies are gray. Skies have turned to mist, and fields have turned to mush.

Yet we are not without the hope that the season can still be redeemed.

Creation’s groans are deafening, but we know that someday green shoots of life will burst forth. We’ll feel the warmth of the sun on our faces. We’ll once again breathe in the smells of tulips and lilacs unfurling after the rain. Babies will be born, and green hope will rise through the dirt.

As we journey through the austere time of Lent, it can be easy to lose the thread of hope we hear about in Romans 15:13:

If the purpose of Lent is to rid ourselves of outside distractions so God may form us inwardly into the likeness of Jesus, we must trust that God will guide us and our families, changing us on the inside so we might reflect the character of Christ in the way we live.

As the prophet Isaiah wrote, may we not become too focused (or performative) with our fasting that we forget the real work of the people of God: to break the chains of injustice and set the captive free (see Isaiah 58:6-7).

March Reading Guide

This month’s reading guide is a simple companion for Lent. Inside, you’ll find where to turn for breath prayers, short reflections, and space to notice what you’re carrying (and what you might be ready to set down) for March 2026.

March 2026 Reading Guide

54.2MB ∙ PDF file

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Here’s how to use it:

• Pick a pace that fits your real life (daily, a few days a week, or once on the weekend).

• Start with the breath prayer before you read—let your body arrive before your mind tries to “do it right.”

• You don’t have to keep up to be faithful.

Year of Breath

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Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday
INHALE: Jesus, I’m tired

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With four kids, many of whom are now in the stage of practices, games, and rehearsals, our weekends are usually filled to the brim.

So, imagine my surprise when I woke up at 11 a.m.—I know. I know. (I think the last time I did that was in high school.)

I stretched and let myself exhale, ready to gently enter into the day, shocked that I managed to sleep in like a teenager, trying not feel guilty for letting myself have this rest, knowing that the upcoming week will be full of early mornings and late nights.

I turned to my bedside table and grabbed my phone.

Breaking news, it said.
Bombs, it said.
Death, it said.
Elementary school, it said.
Children, it said.
War, it said.

I felt like I had awoken to a nightmare.

When your body finally relaxes into rest, the world tends to remind you that, lest you forgot, it’s still on fire.

I don’t want to become numb to the pain. But I don’t want my compassion to calcify into cynicism, either.

It brings us back to the question we’re continually asking these days:

How do we avoid living in a constant state of panic while staying present to what is happening in our wearly world and being tender to what is ours to do about it?

Peace that’s conditional on personal gain is no peace at all.

In the scripture above, Jeremiah calls out leaders and prophets who are responding to what is shattered with shallow, performative solutions. The wound is a sign of something infected and untreated, the result of long-running harm, injustice, and turning away from God.

Instead of telling the truth or doing the hard work of repair, the leaders slap on a bandage and call it healing while wounds fester.

They refuse to take the pain seriously. (And too often, they inflict it.)

Scripture returns to this warning again and again: God grieves leaders who do not protect, tend, and shepherd people with integrity. ((Ezekiel 34:2-4)

There are wounds that cannot be managed with spin.
There is pain that cannot be fixed by military might.
There is harm that cannot be fixed with a slogan.
There is peace that cannot breathed by war.

The ache underneath Jeremiah’s words is an invitation for us today in this Lenten season. We can stop pretending we’re fine. We can tell the truth about what hurts. 

We can turn toward the One who actually heals—the One who doesn’t minimize suffering, doesn’t justify violence, but enters into our wounds, bears them, and makes a way toward wholeness…toward shalom.

Borrow this Prayer for Lent

an excerpt from To Light Their Way

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During this season of Lent, O Lord,
We turn away from the ways of this world
And the lies of the evil one.
We put ourselves and our children into
Your hands
And follow You,
The One who leads from death into life.

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A Better Way

from page 191 of Every Season Sacred

Though I sometimes dream of wrapping my children in Bubble Wrap, protecting them from the world’s hard edges, I know that’s not what God asks of me.

Though we ache to protect our children’s innocence, our role as parents is to guide them and journey alongside them as they traverse this world—a world that is full of great beauty but also marked with injustice, suffering, and death.

Our role as parents who follow Christ is to introduce them to a living Hope that shows us a better way.

In this season of Lent, we’re invited to reflect on the last days of Jesus’ life on earth. We reflect on how He blessed peacemakers (see Matthew 5:9) and healed victims of violence (see Luke 22:49-51). With reverence, we grieve His last days and, finally, His gruesome death at the hands of those in power.

This season is not all bunnies and chicks and new dresses and warm fuzzies. Like parents wanting to wrap up a complicated conversation with our children in a bow, we ache to go past the uncomfortable realities of Lent and move on to Easter. We sit in the pain as we reflect on the sins of our world and the sins we personally have been part of inflicting.

But we must sit in the tension of not yet.

Our job is not to shield our children from every heart-wrenching headline; it’s to help them make sense of the world around them. As parents, we may feel terrified to wade into complex topics, especially when we haven’t seen it modeled well by our peers or our families of origin. Spend just a few minutes on social media, and you’ll see that the norm for dealing with the latest trending news is to hurl insults, to harm instead of heal.

If we don’t model empathy, nuance, and understanding when we talk to our children about the real pain in our world, they will turn elsewhere to get their questions answered.

Through her research, Dr. Baxley has observed, “As our children grow up, their peers and social media will have more influence over their understanding of these issues than you may, especially if they’re not used to having weighty conversations with you.”

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Pray this With Your Kids

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Dear Jesus, be with us when we’re scared.
Help us to remember that You are with us
And that Your Spirit will never leave us.

When we’re afraid or when bad things happen,
Remind us that You’re near.
Thank You for giving us the hope that someday
There will be no more tears.

Help us to be brave enough to share
When we’re sad or scared.
Help us to be strong enough
To stand up for what’s right.

We love You, and we know that You love us
With a love that fills every galaxy—and then some!

Amen.

from Every Season Sacred: Reflections, Prayers, and Invitations to Nourish Your Soul and Nurture Your Family throughout the Year (p. 194).

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Peace is not a Sales Pitch

As people who follow the Prince of Peace, we must be wary of those whose messages of peace change depending on what they get out of it.

When we read the news, it’s clear that when people are motivated by appetite (power, influence, approval, comfort), they’ll bless whoever pays and shame whoever doesn’t.

They’ll call it unity or even peace—but what’s the fruit? Too often, it’s violence, manipulation, fear, moral compromise…the list goes on.

The New Testament has this to tell us: “For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive.” (Romans 16:18)

We have to be aware (and teach our families to be aware) of those whose threats manipulate God’s people through fear rather than truth (Acts 20:29-30). True Light bearers speak God’s word regardless of personal cost (1 Kings 22:13-14; 2 Corinthians 2:17).1

This Lent, I keep coming back to a simple question:

Is what is being said (or done) actually leading us toward Christ?

March Reading Guide

Each month, we like to offer a simple reading guide you can use however your life allows—whether you’re reading five minutes at a time in the carpool line or catching your breath at the end of the day.

Here’s how to use it:

• Choose your pace. Read daily, a few times a week, or only on weekends.

• Read with your body, not just your brain. Before you begin, take two or three slow breaths. Let your shoulders drop. Let your jaw soften.

• If you’re using this with family: read a short portion, ask one question, and close with a simple breath prayer. Keep it doable.

March 2026 Reading Guide

54.2MB ∙ PDF file

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Year of Breath

You’re not alone in feeling the reverberating aftershocks of injustice and destruction in this world.

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Giveaway Winner

This week’s giveaway winner: AG! (Reply to this email or DM me if you see your name here so I can get your book to you!) Paid subscribers get access to random giveaways. We’ve already done a bunch of books this year!

Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday

INHALE: You, O God,

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I made a reel sharing how eager I was this year for space to just sit in my humanity and trust that I have a God big enough to hold it all. All the pain. All the wondering. All the questions I have about life and about death and about who God is and about who I am in the midst of it.

In 2026, we have been inundated by death and destruction. I truly believe our just, righteous, compassionate God weeps over the suffering and injustice embedded in these times. And I need a faith that can hold all of what it is to be a human in this world and still offer hope to hold onto, not just in the future but in the right now.

So I sat in a pew with my daughter Eliza, who has Down syndrome and a hard time controlling her body sometimes, and my son Abram on the other side, who was furiously doodling on a notepad. And as I tried to keep them quiet and watched my husband mix the oil and the ash, marking it upon the young and the old, I felt my love and my limitations, my devotion and my distractions swirl around my weary heart.

Finally, I thought. Finally, I have permission to be sad. Finally, I don’t have to try to push myself to control what was never mine to control. Finally, I can let myself be human and let God be God.

And yet, as soon as I got home, my inbox was bombarded with just exactly how to do Lent.

And I felt immediately exhausted by a season that has only just begun. I think it’s because every Christian author out here feels some sort of pressure to offer more. To offer something new. A new series. A new prayer. To offer more. More content. More commentary.

New, new, new. More, more, more.

As a writer, I can’t help but whisper: Does this churn ever stop?

To be clear, I’m grateful for those who can offer their hearts honestly and humbly, year after year. (And those of us who are part of the paid/private Year of Breath portion of this weekly newsletter will receive all sorts of breath prayers and resources for each week of Lent.)

Annnnnd…I think the push of new and more misses the whole point of Lent.

Lent pushes against our productivity pressure and monetization mindset.

Lent invites us to throw away the pressure for new and more and sit with open hands as we wonder: What’s so bad with old and less?

The Church calendar sets aside 40 days for us to stop all the doing. To let go of the breath we’ve been holding and reflect on how, actually, we are fully, unflinchingly human. That we are from dust and someday, beyond our control, we will return to dust. That we are finite. That, no matter how much Instagram memes tell us we are the center of the universe, there is infinitely more beyond what we can see or hear or touch or taste.

What if, this Lent, instead of all the chatter playing in your mind and coming up with a special plan for prayers, you stopped all the talking and just…listened?

What might it look like to listen to God in your actual life, right here, right now? To live with an open heart and open hands and have no agenda at all except to draw near to God and to the ones God has for you to love and to care for and to defend and to feed and to advocate for and most importantly…to love?

We don’t need another Lenten season to tell us how bad things are. We know the pain. The suffering. The injustice. The tears. The cruelty. The systemic evils. The personal woes.

We know it.

Maybe this Lent, the most sacred thing we can do is open our eyes to the color instead of believing the lie that we are meant to live in the cold shades of gray.

Maybe this Lent, we can exhale and ask the One who gives us each breath to hold us in our wondering and our wandering.

Maybe this Lent, the most sacred thing we can do is breathe.

Borrow this Prayer

from page 145 of Every Season Sacred

Compassionate Christ, we thank You for opening the chasm between our hurting hearts and God’s lovingkindness. In all we say, all we do, and all we are, help our family to be bathed in Your light so we might reflect Your love.

Protect us from the hierarchies of the world that tell us to care only for ourselves or those with power and popularity. Keep our hearts tender so we may move toward our neighbors, extending care and pouring out the compassion we would want to receive.

Thank You for the ways the youngest among us embody Your mercy and show us how to live out Your love. Help us to see how interconnected humanity is by growing in us an understanding of kinship. Move us toward a future of mutuality, where compassion is freely given and received, where justice flows like a river.

In the light of Your divine love, may our family grow in compassion.

Amen.

Yes, And…

from Every Season Sacred

Spring’s beginnings are messy here in the Midwest: snow melts into slush and then morphs into mud puddles. Daytime stretches longer, but we still send the kids to school with snow boots and gloves.

The church calendar also reflects this messiness, inviting us to enter into a time of reflection and repentance as we observe Lent (the forty days leading up to Jesus’ death and burial) and—finally!— His resurrection. The tough part about spring is that we don’t get to skip the mess and go straight to the celebration of Easter.

Just as the daffodils and tulips and cherry blossoms take time to burst forth, we, too, have to take time to sit in the messy, muddy middle space.

When my husband and I were teens, we were in an improv acting group together. One of the key rules of improv is to reply, “Yes, and . . .” to your fellow actors. Spring is an offering of yes, and. Yes, we can shed our winter layers and spend more time outside—and our kids will track muddy footprints inside right after we’ve mopped the floor…Yes, more daylight is emerging—and sometimes it seems like the gray skies will never leave.

Amid a backdrop of muddy boots and rain puddles, spring unfolds and pastel blossoms unfurl, reminding us that, in Christ, we are invited to be new creations too.

In Jesus, God brings “all creation into harmony once again” (2 Corinthians 5:18, fnv).

We can journey through the fasts and feasts of spring with hope, holding tight to this promise: “The Great Spirit has chosen us to represent him in the sacred task of helping others find and walk this path of peacemaking and healing—turning enemies into friends.” (2 Corinthians 5:18, fnv).

Together with our children, we are being changed, from the inside out.

God is with us in the tension of wondering if winter will ever fully leave and if summer will ever fully arrive. During Lent, we’re invited to tend to the soil of our inner lives so we may have growth and new life.

An Invitation into Wonder

is a friend and a writer & theologian whose work I deeply admire. I’m so eager to read her brand-new book, Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love With Scripture. (I loved her first book, Woven—she has such skill for breaking down the Bible in such rooted and yet fresh way.)

It’s a joy to invite Meredith to this space today.

(Keep reading to win a copy!)

What if the Bible Doesn’t Want to Hurt Me?

a note from

Wonder is book to help adults feel more confident and comfortable exploring the Bible with the kids in their lives. But it is also, not so secretly, a book to help adults feel that way about the Bible themselves.

• I think about people who were told the Bible is trustworthy because it is literally true, and when they learn about context, genre, culture, and language all impacting the text and its interpretation, the question lingers: Does all this make the Bible less trustworthy?

• I think about people who were told Bible stories in ways that only highlighted whether the person in the story was obedient or not, so that the gospel was one of sin management, like Dallas Willard said. And they wonder: Why does this story not seem very compelling or life-giving? Like this good news isn’t all that good?

• I think about people against whom the Bible was weaponized, used to scare or shame them. And now they hide from it, for good reason, but part of them wonders: What if the Bible doesn’t want to hurt me? And could God be better than what I’ve heard?

But I find myself convinced the Bible is trustworthy because it faithfully tells the story of God in the world, in the style and reflective of the culture that lived, told, and wrote its stories.

Together those stories say this God, our God, is offering the good news that there is life to be found trusting Jesus, who meant it when he said he was gentle, humble of heart, and that his load was easy and light.

So I set out to gather Bible stories that I believe can help tell that bigger story of Scripture and help kids meet God, and I paraphrased those stories the way I would for a kid. Then I layered in background notes, like a study Bible might have, to help with the details and questions that come along with exploring the Bible (from kids and us!).

I wrote Wonder to help you talk about the Bible with kids. But I also wrote Wonder hoping it would comfort you if you’re scared of or have been hurt by the Bible. Hoping it would make you more confident about what God’s really like.

I’ve included a full story for you here, one that shows that God’s delightfully diverse kingdom is for everyone. One that shows how knowing the story of Scripture can help someone meet Jesus. One that shows God’s use of creative and unusual means to accomplish God’s priorities and God’s faithfulness to keep promises.

I hope you enjoy revisiting the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.

Exclusive Excerpt from Wonder

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Philip And The Eunuch

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Giveaway!

GREAT news! We’ve been on a real roll of giveaways this year…and Meredith and her publisher would like to gift one of you a copy of this hefty new book!

Win a copy! Simply leave a comment with a simple way you’re holding space for wonder in this season. Winners must be able to receive mail in the U.S. and will be selected randomly.

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Last week’s winner: . Congrats!! Enjoy ’s awesome new book. :)

For You: Free & Simple One-Page Reading Guide

If you have a copy of To Light Their Way and Every Season Sacred…you already have a TON of Lent resources at your fingertips! Just download this simple reading plan for exactly where to turn. (As always, thank you, Kara, for making this possible!)

Reading Plan For February 2026 Download

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Year of Breath

You don’t have to do anything more for God to love you more. You don’t have to follow a particular fast or say a particular prayer for this season to be sacred.

Full stop.

And… if you want a little more structure and stability, I’d love to (humbly and without pressure) invite you to join the paid version of this newsletter, called Year of Breath.

If you’ve felt a little nudge to draw closer to God in this season and you’re looking for a simple invitation into spiritual formation, I want to offer you 30 percent off.

Get 30% off for 1 year

Every single week, your support of my writing unlocks access to a breath prayer for each day, a curated playlist that follows the week’s themes, a breath-prayer wallpaper to remind you to exhale throughout the week, a simple spiritual practice, and reflection questions.

Take what speaks to you and leave the rest. (You can also join just for these 40 days and then cancel.)

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If joining is not in the budget, please respond to this email, and I will get you a scholarship.

Breath Prayers for Week 1 of Lent

Monday

INHALE: Free me from

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Hope can come in many forms—a borrowed prayer, a parking lot sunset, a song on the radio at just the right time, a nuzzle from your pup at the end of the long day, $5 tulips from the grocery store, a late-winter day that’s just warm enough to pop open a window…the list goes on.

The best writers I know are noticers—pros at finding the sacred in all seasons, experts at seeing the beauty in the ashes.

And in that noticing, they offer hope.

My friend is a noticer. (ICYMI: He wrote us this amazing guest post last year about his journey in waiting with hope.) Tanner’s poems, prayers, and reflections point us to hope, day after day, right here in the middle of all of this.

I don’t know anyone who couldn’t use a little hope these days.

Lucky for us, Tanner has written us a brand-new book!

I had a chance to read an early copy of Getting Through What You’re Going Through, and it’s good.

My Endorsement

With honest humor, hard-won hope, and a whole lot of heart, these stories and poems meet us in the mess and remind us we’re not alone. Tanner’s relatable, reassuring words offer glimmers of goodness right when we need them most.

This book is for everyone—the faithful, the doubting, the wondering—and yes, even those who don’t consider themselves poem people. Turn to any page and finally let go of that breath you’ve been holding.

Giveaway!

Tanner would love to give one of you a copy of Getting Through What You’re Going Through! Just comment about something small (or big!) that is giving you a little bit of hope to hold onto right now.

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Winners must be able to receive mail in the U.S. These giveaways are a small token of appreciation for being a paid supporter of this newsletter. Winners will be selected at random within a week.

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Last week’s winner: Maura Wertin! Congrats!

Toy Trucks at Church

an excerpt from Getting Through What You’re Going Through: Notes and Poems for Hoping and Becoming by

He was maybe four years old. He had short blond hair and big brown eyes and was happy the way children are happy. He kneeled for most of the Sunday worship service as he pushed around his trucks on the seat of the pew, making soft sounds with his mouth. Some boys choose dinosaurs. Some choose animals. He chose trucks.

His older sisters were next to him, sandwiched between him and his mom and dad. My wife and I sat behind him, and every now and again he would look at me and smile before returning to his matchbox-sized trucks.

I imagine his mother said to him before they walked into church, “You can only bring three trucks this morning.” Three is a holy number, after all. One was a yellow pickup truck. The other two were rigs without the trailers.

As we sang the opening hymn, he moved the trucks left and right, forward and backward. He was content, listening as he played. He bounced his head along to the tune as the wheels on the trucks went round and round. When it was time to pray, he parked his trucks and folded his hands and bowed his head and closed his eyes. As soon as we said “Amen,” he went back to work.

When it was time for the children’s message, he popped up from his knees and scooted past his sisters and parents before sitting next to our pastor. He listened and smiled and heard that we are God’s treasure. We are precious and unique and worthy. We are found and cared for and loved.

On the way back to the pew, he stopped and hugged his mom. He sat in her lap for a few minutes before crawling behind his sisters, returning to the end of the pew to play with his trucks. He continued to make soft noises with his mouth, powering the trucks gently across the red cushioned pew.

And that was the morning I learned worship is more than singing and praying.

February Reading Guide

Save or print this one-page guide for where to turn for timely prayers and reflections this month!

Reading Plan For February 2026 Download

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Your Soul Care Package for the Week

Borrowed hope is still hope. Thanks be to God.

Keep reading for daily breath prayers for this week, a grounding breath prayer practice for when everything feels like too much, Scripture to reflect on, a brand-new curated weekly playlist, guided reflection questions, a breath prayer phone lockscreen, and a benediction to help you move into the week.

Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday
INHALE I hold to the promise

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And at the same time: we’re raising children in anxious times that have never existed before. The anxious generation is being raised by anxious parents in anxious times.

What if the Church came alongside parents and caregivers as a non-anxious presence?

A couple of years ago, some of you took a survey I shared—and I want you to know how grateful I am for what you offered there. You named exhaustion and longing. You named confusion, grief, hope, and the desire for something more sustaining than quick fixes.

I’ve carried your words with me. And they’ve deeply informed my work.

I’m grateful to partner with Azuza Pacific University Institute for Faith, Leadership, and Service, which has graciously extended free access to a three-part webinar series that directly builds on these shared questions and longings.

Together, we’ll reflect on how our ordinary lives are invitations to encounter God and live into faith with our children.

Reserve Your Spot!

Drawing from years of listening to you, and to parents across the country, we’re asking: Who is nourishing the soul of parents? What are we really aching for? And how can we tend to the inner lives of caregivers so we can truly support our kids in this complicated world?

Across the series, we’ll explore how different forms of prayer and simple spiritual rhythms can meet families where we actually are. We’ll imagine what it looks like to support faith formation amid busy schedules, emotional overwhelm, and the broader stresses of our world. And we’ll practice how to hold (and extend) honesty and hope in our ever weary world.

Each webinar will include a hands-on practice, reflection, and key takeaways to help us nourish the souls of parents and caregivers, so families can flourish as we discern our place within the larger story of faith.

Do You Have a Spicy One?

(pssst…keep reading for a new book giveaway!)

I’m so grateful to count as a friend. For more than two years, we have been part of a tight-knit group of writers, creators, and leaders who brainstorm with each other and support one another through the highs and lows of our professional (and personal) lives.

I’ve laughed and cried with her, and I was so deeply honored to read an early copy of her brand-new, incredible debut book for parents called Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid.

You may remember that Mary was a guest liturgist on Instagram, and it went a bit viral. (Mary has a huge following on IG because not only is she incredibly wise and relatable, but she’s also hilarious. She is whip-smart, and I tend to think you have to be very quick to be funny.)

If you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed in your parenting, this book is an amazing resource I can’t recommend enough!

Giveaway!

Big news! Mary and her publisher are offering one of us a hot-off-the-press copy of Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid! Yay!

To enter, simply comment below with why you’d like a copy. Winners must be able to receive mail at a U.S. address and will be selected at random on Saturday. (These giveaways are a perk for paid subscribers. Join or cancel at any time.)

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Parenting a Spicy One

Tired of negotiating with a tiny tyrant? Feeling drained by extreme emotions and unpredictable outbursts—including your own? Do you fear you might be raising a menace but also want to avoid dimming their sparkly light? Does “gentle parenting” advice make you chuckle bitterly because it doesn't work on your kid?

Welcome to parenting a Spicy One—a child more loyal to their own soul than to your agenda.

Parenting coach and adult Spicy One Mary Van Geffen knows raising these future world changers requires courage and compassion.

Based on her experience guiding thousands of parents through her program, she offers a transformative approach to:

• staying calm during five-alarm tantrums

• choosing connection over control

• maintaining boundaries without crushing their spirit

• finding joy and confidence in parenting this prickly creature

• being okay when they are not

• parenting with a tenderness you never experienced as a child

Each chapter provides small, doable changes to help you become calmer, kinder, and firmer, plus self-reflection questions to help you make space for the exceptional adult your Spicy One will one day become.

Reparent Your Inner Child

guest post by (an adapted excerpt from chapter 6)

When my kids were little, I secretly dreaded going back East to visit my parents. I tended to find myself face-to-face with the familiar feeling of being left out...not seen. I would experience the sting of abandonment all over again. No matter how much work I thought I had done.

One time, I was supposed to go to Park City to vacation with my parents. Mr. Van Geffen was stuck at work, so it was going to be just me and my littles.

As the trip drew closer, I started getting headaches. An adult child of parents who enjoy using alcohol to excess daily, I was filled with foreboding. I dreaded that certain time of the evening when you might expect to gather and play games or watch a movie together, because my parents would disappear. They might still be sitting in the same room, but their essence was replaced with glassy-eyed strangers.

I mentioned to my therapist the impending doom I felt about this upcoming visit. She echoed that for everyone you are on a trip with to disappear without comment sounded like abandonment. She instructed me not to abandon my inner child as well.

What was that supposed to mean? She blew my mind by saying, “Your inner child is the part of you that’s been present ever since you were floating contentedly in your mother’s womb. She’s witnessed all the shifts you have gone through, from baby, infant, toddler, young child to gangly preteen.”

As you grow into a bigger body and more logical, conscious brain, your younger self doesn’t just melt away. Your inner child remembers every beautiful memory as well as your childhood fears, traumas, neglect, and significant losses. She is a part of your subconscious that has been picking up messages since way before it had the luxury of adult words to make sense of it all. When you get triggered and can’t understand why, it’s likely a younger part of you is screaming for your attention.

Inner-child work is connecting to that younger part of you that is still just as scared, lonely, or unseen as she was when you were little. Turns out, my inner child was constantly wondering, “Am I too much? Why doesn’t anyone want to be with me?”

Those moments of disconnection with my family activated and condemned that lonely younger part of me.

That was such a foreign idea to me. How do I ask myself something? Yet I often asked myself each morning, “What do I want to wear?” But that voice was usually all business, cold and removed. This exercise would require a voice of self-tenderness.

When that inevitable moment came on vacation, and I walked back into an empty room after putting the kids down for the night, I slowly exhaled. Then I asked my inner child (who was starting to spiral into thoughts like “See! No one loves me. I’m hard to love!”) a question: What would she like to do?

I imagined her squealing, “I wanna scrapbook. And watch a romantic comedy! And eat that ice cream in the freezer.” It was the 2000s. So I took her upstairs, and we watched When Harry Met Sally and glued paper frames over photos together. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t sink into victim-like sadness over my parents’ behavior. I didn’t feel abandoned, because I stayed with myself. I didn’t leave me too.

Part of parenting self-care is reparenting the little child within you. The child who wasn’t treasured or seen. She is still stuck in your neural loops. Her deep unmet needs can sabotage your efforts to stay calm and not yell. She doesn’t mean to sabotage. She’s trying to be seen...by anyone, but especially by you.

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A Prayer for You

by

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

O Lord, I confess,
I am tired and angry
At myself,
At this larger-than-life child,
And maybe at You.

Why didn’t you give me
One of the easy ones?
The kids who pine to
Wear matching outfits.

The ones who dutifully ask for
Permission to cross the road.
The mild children who can run more
Than one errand without a tantrum.

Forgive me, Lord,
For my eye rolls, my heavy sighs
And the conditional love
That I sometimes direct
At this precious human.

Give me grace where I feel contempt.
Give me mercy for the meltdowns.
Burn away my fear for their future.
Remind me today that difficult children
Can make the most brilliant adults.
But most of all,
Give me deep delight
In this storm of a child.

Let me love them like you do, God.
Extravagantly, recklessly, and unreasonably.
Open my eyes to the way
My Spicy One™
Bears your image
And echos Your creativity,
Love and power.

Amen.

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Giveaway Winner!

Congratulations to Page Phillips for winning last week’s book giveaway for paid subscribers! Page, please reply to this email with your mailing address.

Reading Plan For February 2026 Download

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Your Soul Care Package for the Week

Keep reading for daily breath prayers for this week, a grounding breath prayer practice for when everything feels like too much, Scripture to reflect on, a brand-new curated weekly playlist, guided reflection questions, a breath prayer phone lockscreen, and a benediction to help you move into the week.

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Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday
INHALE: God of presence,

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It’s fixed now! You can comment here or there.

You’re gettin…

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As I share in Every Season Sacred:

Breath prayers are short meditations to help you focus your body and your mind on the One who gives each breath. Christians have used this contemplative practice of praying as you inhale and exhale for generations as a way to be still and know that God is God (see Psalm 46:10).

These simple prayers can act as an anchor, tethering you to contemplation and reflection throughout the week. Ask God to help you become mindful of your breath and your body as you breathe in and out. In our overwhelming daily realities, it’s easy to become disconnected from who God has created us to be—fully human, with a connected heart, soul, mind, and body. If parenting is a continual undoing, these breath prayers act as a tangible invitation to let God piece us back together, breath by breath.

“The value of a deep breath is something we must continue to learn and relearn on the path to peace,” writes poet and artist Morgan Harper Nichols. In doing so, we exchange “quick, shallow breaths for a cycle of breath that represents the fullness of how we were meant to breathe—mindfully, wholly.”

You can say these prayers silently or repeat the words aloud. Whether you’re rocking a baby, helping with homework, or stuck in traffic, you can integrate these mindful moments into the rhythms of your day.

Being mindful of our breathing strengthens resilience, reduces stress, and regulates the nervous system. Study after study reveals the connection between our breath, brains, and bodies, modern medicine affirming the ancient wisdom of praying with our breath. Research into how mindfulness (being aware of the present) and breathwork (how we intentionally breathe) affect our brains and bodies has skyrocketed in the last five years.

Advances in neurobiology have shown us just how intricately interconnected God has made us. Breathing is the only bodily function we perform unconsciously and can consciously control. (You can take a deep breath. You can breathe shallowly. You can breathe deep from your belly or take shallow breaths from your chest.)

Breathing can lower the stress hormone cortisol, relieve chronic pain, and reduce the risk of heart disease.

As more trauma-informed therapists integrate breathwork into their practices, and as the technology available to us widens our understanding of how our brains and bodies are connected, we’re learning about the healing power of breath in record time.

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As I’ve become awake to this beautiful interconnectedness of faith and science, I’m in awe of how we’ve been so intricately made.

What connects it all is not our breath but the One who whispers life into our lungs.

Deep Breath, Little Whisper

When I saw that Scott James had a book coming out about breath prayer for kids, I couldn’t get my hands on a copy quick enough. The illustrations are beautiful, and the words are a balm for both children (and grown-ups).

I was happy to endorse it:

“It’s so easy to overcomplicate prayer. This exhale of a book invites children (and the grownups who love them) into the simple, sacred rhythm of breath prayer. As someone who often turns to this practice in the comings and goings of the day, I’ve long hoped for a breath prayer resource to share with families of young children—and this is it. What a needed reminder that the One who gives us breath is always with us, every moment of every day.”

Kayla Craig, author of To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers and Liturgies for Parents and Every Season Sacred: Reflections, Prayers, and Invitations to Nourish Your Soul and Nurture Your Family throughout the Year; creator of Liturgies for Parents

BOOK Giveaway!

Scott James and ZonderKidz are graciously offering a copy of Deep Breath, Little Whisper to a lucky winner! To enter, simply leave a comment with a breath prayer you’ve been turning to lately. Winner must be able to receive mail in the U.S., will be chosen randomly, and announced in next week’s newsletter!

EDITED TO ADD: If you tried to comment and weren’t able to, there was a brief Substack glitch that is fixed now! You can comment on this post or this one to enter.

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(Paid subscribers to Year of Breath have access to the private comment section!)

My Wow Became a Prayer

I’m grateful to welcome Scott to this space to share a bit more about why he wrote Deep Breath, Little Whisper:

a guest post by Scott James

My daughter and I bundled up against the cold as we watched the orange disk slowly sink below the horizon. Pastel clouds popped against a canvas of delicate blue, with streaks of last-gasp sunbeams radiating upward. Simply stunning.

An unconscious exhale slipped past my lips: “Wow.”

My daughter basked in the beauty of the sunset with a dreamy look in her eyes. “Wow,” she agreed.

Then, ever so quietly, she added, “Look what God did.”

And just like that, my wow became a prayer.

The wonder of the scene was always there. Its majesty was undeniable. The question was, who was behind it? Whose majesty was it pointing to? In the twilight of that evening, my daughter had the clarity of mind to pause, appreciate, and give credit where credit was due. As we marveled at the stunning canvas of sky, she reminded me who the painter was.

Our spontaneous exhale of wonder was elevated into a breath prayer of praise.

My daughter’s wisdom—profound and childlike all at once—was a gift to me that evening. It was a tangible reminder that God invites us to call out to him in any situation.

To her, it wasn’t just a sunset; it was an opportunity to revel in God’s grandeur. As the beauty of creation swirled overhead, her heart overflowed with a whisper of praise to the Maker of heaven and earth.

For me, it was a spiritual stop and smell the roses moment. The fact that my daughter instinctively saw that sunset as a prompt to commune with her Creator was a blessing to behold.

And so, in our home, we’ve made a habit of it. We take our cue from Paul’s encouragement to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and we heed the practical wisdom of DM Lloyd-Jones, who counseled us to “always respond to every impulse to pray.” Our aim is to foster a spiritual sensitivity that reflexively weaves prayer into everyday activities.

One way we do this is through a kid-friendly approach to breath prayers. If you’re not familiar with breath prayer, it’s a rhythmic practice in which we combine short prayers or Scripture recitations with purposeful breathing patterns.

It links body and soul, helping us moderate our thoughts and emotions as we intentionally connect with the Lord. I find it to be an incredibly rewarding habit, and one that is easily accessible to kids.

As we’ve practiced it, my kids and I have found our way into a sort of shorthand, in-the-moment approach that truly helps us respond to every impulse to pray. It goes like this: right when we need to, wherever we need to, we take a deep breath and whisper out what our heart wants to say.

We trust that God is always ready to listen, so we deliberately look for ways to step into that conversation. And as we tune our hearts to commune with God in any situation, we find ourselves choosing to rest in Him, no matter what’s going on. It helps us stay centered in His love even as life swirls around us. Whether we’re soaring high or crashing low, these prayers are ballast that steadies us in the whirlwind.

That’s the heart behind my new children’s book, Deep Breath, Little Whisper. By modeling this kid-friendly style of breath prayers, I hope to help families build habits of daily communion with God.

Through relatable, everyday moments, the book shows children that prayer doesn’t have to be long or complicated to be meaningful—sometimes, prayer is as natural as taking a deep breath and whispering out what your heart wants to say.

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Through the highs and lows of this hectic life, it’s comforting to know we can call out to God and experience His peace in any moment. God hears the whispers of our heart, and He is always ready to listen to every little word.

God loves it when His children talk to Him—and connecting with God can be as easy as using a simple word or phrase. Deep Breath, Little Whisper introduces the idea of breath prayers by using a series of kid-friendly scenarios and engaging text to show young readers how they can have a conversation with God in the moment, wherever they are and however they’re feeling. Each example also helps remind them that prayer doesn’t have to be big and complex to be meaningful—it just has to come from the heart.

The book is perfect for:

• read-aloud or prayer time

• introducing breath prayers into your family

• helping children from preschool to early elementary develop a relationship with God through easy-to-remember prayers and prompts

• teaching different types of prayers, including praise and adoration, thanksgiving, intercessory, and confession

• showing kids how they can calm their minds and turn to God no matter what happens

Get the Book

Scott James and his wife, Jaime, have 4 children and live in Birmingham, where he works as a pediatric physician. He is the author of family worship books, including The Expected One, The Risen One, and Mission Accomplished, as well as illustrated children's books such as The Sower, The Littlest Watchman, Where Is Wisdom?, and God Cares For Me.

February Reading Guide

Reading Plan For February 2026 Download

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A Breath Prayer for When You Need Peace

from page 183 of To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers & Liturgies for Parents

(ICYMI, there’s a whole section of breath prayers in the back of the book!)

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INHALE: Hear my cry, Lord.
EXHALE: Listen to my cries for mercy.

May this breath prayer bring a moment of peace as you ask God for mercy to fill your heart and your world.

Breathe in; breathe out.

Take a few minutes to pause from the scroll and pray. This prayer is taken directly from Psalm 86:6.

A Prayer for When Your Child Sees Something Scary on the News

from page 88 of To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers & Liturgies for Parents

(ICYMI, there are breath prayers for each week of the year in Every Season Sacred!)

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O God, You hold the world in Your hands,
So You know when we hurt
And when we ache.

You feel it too—
The beat of
Our heaving hearts,
Reverberating into You.

Our children are perceptive,
And their brains and hearts
Have absorbed news of
Unspeakable things.

How do we see You in these headlines?
How do we pray when we don’t have words?
Help us enter into conversations with our child.

Let Your love be a raft
When we feel like we’re sinking.
Help us resist the urge to say
Situations are better than they are.

Help us to be honest
And gentle
As we invite our child to express their emotions—
Their sadness, their fear, their frustration.

For in naming our feelings,
We can move through them together.
As we sit with our child
And stare into the brokenness of humanity,
We pray for eyes to see You.
May we learn from our child
What it is to be moved to tears.

And will You give our family
Hearts that cling to hope
Even when life is scary
Or feels out of control?

O God, You are constant
In turbulent times.
You are unchanging,
And we can trust You
To be with us
Even when we feel
Like we’re reaching out for You in the dark.

God, give us wisdom to know
How to parent our child
As they metabolize the pain of our world.
Help us tend to their heart
And hold them with care,
Just as You do for us.

Year of Breath

Keep reading for a breath prayer to turn to each day this week, along with a breath-prayer wallpaper/lockscreen, a playlist for when you just need to catch your breath, reflection prompts to take into this week, Scripture to reflect on, and a guided prayer practice.

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A Fresh Set of Daily Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday

INHALE: God of compassion,

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My kids are home from school because of extreme cold (it got to -45 windchill—yes, you read that right—at night), and I found myself pacing and picking at my cuticles while Jonny was doing helpful things around the house, like folding towels and finally going through our sock bins to put together matches.

We lost power overnight, but have the fireplace going. Our 115-year-old home is having a hard time staying warm. Maybe it’s weary, too.

There we sit at the heart of our home, flames flickering as every member of our family and both dogs come and go, but always return to the center.

I watch the flames, and I worry.

For our neighbors and those who have nowhere warm to lay their head.
For my kids with chronic illnesses and all the viruses going around.
For the suffering, the injustice, the confusion, the pain that swirls in every heartbreaking headline.

Do you ever feel like we’ve been sucked into a never-ending anxiety spiral?

How do we stay informed and connected, get our work done, keep our kids warm and clothed and fed, and most of all loved, remain involved with our communities, be connected friends and family members…and somehow stay connected to the God who, if we’re really honest, sometimes feels distant, uncaring, or not even real?

It’s hard to read the news as a mother right now. It’s hard to read it as a follower of Jesus, too.

We, as a generation, and especially as parents, are more interconnected than ever before. We have it all at our fingertips: the aboslute worst of humanity in the headlines; Facebook hot takes that you never wanted to see from acquaintances; influencers shilling the latest sweater you must “run, not walk” to buy. We casually use the word “algorithm” in regular conversation, yet do we ever consider who (or what) is programming our perception of reality?

After mindless scrolling that started as an attempt to be a well-informed citizen, I have to acknowledge I’ve been gulping down a steady stream of anxiety courtesy of the little rectangle in my hand.

I meander. I clean the kitchen counters. I trim my nails.

“I don’t know what to do with this anxious energy,” I tell Jonny after deleting the Threads app from my phone.

“Maybe you could write Year of Breath,” he replied.

So that’s what I’m doing. Because I want you to know that you are not alone in these anxious times…and because I also need to be reminded that I’m not alone, too. That no matter what, fires of hope still flicker, even in the bleak midwinter.

I think sometimes our algorithms make us feel like we’re in a silo, the only one processing and feeling overwhelmed by all of this. Our fears and insecurities tell us we’re alone in our overwhelm, isolated in our fear.

My heart aches. I want God to fix things, to be some sort of spiritual genie. I want the infinite to be finite, the indescribable put into an eloquent scroll of words, the breath of heaven captured and held and never ever let go.

Prayer, especially when paired with intentional breathing, can help our brains and bodies reset when we are pulled into the abyss of anxiety.

When my worries begin to tumbleweed, I do my best to take a breath:

INHALE: O God,

EXHALE: You are with me.

All around the U.S., we’re experiencing frigid temperatures. We’re also experiencing, I think, blizzards worth of spiritual coldness, of hearts hardened instead of set on fire.

In Acts 2, we’re told that all who had gathered in the upper room experienced “a sound like a mighty rushing wind.” The Hebrew word for spirit, ruach, also means wind or breath.

God breathed.

And everything changed.

It was as if the whole room was on fire.

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We need to be on fire again,
For our hope is no longer an easy hope.
We live in a culture of despair
Within which Pentecost can no logner be taken for granted.
Hence we must take upon ourselves the burden of the times
And refuse to make the Holy Spirit a piece of private property
But a spirit that matters.

Mary Jo Leddy

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“Were not our hearts burning within us?”

It’s a question asked by two people after a transformative encounter with the risen Jesus. They moved beyond their doubt and into a belief they could not rationalize, understand, or fully explain—yet somehow knew, deep within, that God was truly with them, right there on the ordinary path they were walking on, despite all the awful things they’d seen and suffered.

Mary Jo Leddy writes, “our hope is no longer an easy hope.”

Was it ever?

I don’t know. It’s easy to feel hopeful when things are going well. When our happiness and healthiness batteries are charged, when that job comes through or that relationship is secure. But I’m wondering if circumstantial hope is hope at all.

Maybe the kind of hope that lights our hearts on fire—and keeps us warm in the center of who we are—is the kind of hope that burns on through the elements of life. That keeps us tender when anxiety wants to harden our hearts, when fear tempts us to create a hard protective shell of cynicism or numbness.

When I’m slipping into a spiral of why and what if, I take a breath.

I remember the One who meets us on the roads of our ordinary lives meets us in the wondering.

A theist believes in God. A Christian believes in God incarnate.

Ronald Rolheiser puts it this way: “A Theist believes in a God in heaven, whereas a Christian believes in a God in heaven who is also physically present on this earth inside of human beings.”

We stoke the embers of hope together.

And thanks be to God, the Breath of Life breathes into us, with us in it all.

Even here, even now.

Refer a friend

Words for the Week

from page 66 of Every Season Sacred

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Simple Prayers for When You Have No More Words

• Jesus, You are with me.

• God, help me know You are here.

• Jesus, You are Lord.

• God, be near.

February Reading Guide

We want to read (and pray more, too)… but where do we begin?

ICYMI:

• To Light Their Way is a collection of nuanced and nurturing prayers and liturgies, with everything from ordinary moments to prayers of celebration, lament, holidays, and more.

• Every Season Sacred is split into 4 seasons, and there’s a short chapter for each week of the year for you to care for your own soul, along with family conversation question prompts, a breath prayer, and two options of short prayers you can pray with your family.

Every month, Kara, a member of our community here, puts together a simple one-page printable reading guide. You’ll find where to turn for seasonally appropriate reflections and prayers, and you’ll find some breath prayers, too! February is Black History Month, gives us Valentine’s Day, and, blessedly, is the shortest month of the year! You’ll find prayers for all of these monthly themes.

Reading Plan For February 2026

219KB ∙ PDF file

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Download this PDF to print or save on your phone!

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We hope this free resource helps you feel a little less alone. (Thank you, Kara!)

Keep Reading

If your soul needs a little tending to, a care package awaits below. Paid subscribers (who help me be able to do this work, thank you!!!) receive a fresh batch of breath prayers, a new playlist, reflection questions, a guided prayer practice, and a breath prayer phone lockscreen/wallpaper.

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If it is cost-prohibitive for you to join: Please respond to this email for a scholarship, no questions asked. If you have emailed me and NOT received free access yet, please reach out again! My inbox can get quite full.

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Breath Prayers for this Week

You’ll find a breath prayer for each day of this week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. You’ll also find a go-to breath prayer to turn to throughout the week.

Read more

I started the year with a five-year-old, a three-year-old, a one-month-old, and I was 5 months pregnant.

I lived in a small, charming, walkable town that, in the year, broke my heart in so many ways with their political vitriol, all while smiling with a casserole on my doorstep. It was difficult to process.

TLDR: I started the year with hope and ended with heartbreak.

I was only 28. There I was, raising four children, two with the trauma of adoption, one with a significant chronic illness, and one with significant disabilities. Youth is a grace. Trust in God is a grace. Cluelessness, in some ways, is a grace.

I have so much self-compassion as I look back. I can see the love in my eyes, the joy, the tiredness, the hope. Our family has always been deeply connected, and I see it in the photos. I see it clearly now. Their little smiles. The fact that there is no breathing room between any of us in those captures, cheek to chubby cheek.

Past and Present

I often worry I’ve been so present for my family, but not fully—well—present.

My mind up in the clouds, my eyes down at my phone. I feel like I looked up and here they are: growing limbs and basketball practice and staying late for play rehearsal and getting a ride home.

I sit in the little corner chair by the fire, wrapped in a blanket, losing myself in a novel—remembering the glory of a good story, the humanity of it all—as life swirls around me. Eliza on the couch with Jonny. Abram on the floor playing with Magna-Tiles from Santa, holding onto childhood. Daniel Tiger is playing on the TV, and it’s for Eliza—but maybe it’s for all of us.

I’m reading, and then quite all at once, I’m not. I’m listening.

Daniel Tiger has to go potty at the train station, and he’s scared. His mom reminds him of the brave moments when he went potty at the library, at preschool.

And suddenly I see it all—the moments with each of my sons, narrating the experience as we move into the stall: Yes, we can go potty here. No, you can’t touch that. We’ll see. Good job. You’re so brave. Let’s go wash our hands.

I think of the little shoes—the blue ones with the worn Velcro and the toes just beginning to come undone. The superhero ones that lit the way. I see it now, little feet poking out beneath the stall. I hear it now, little voices calling me Mommy.

And I think about how, at some point, it was the last time. The last time a tiny hand reached for mine before entering a big room and feeling brave enough to do a very big thing.

The book I’m reading (The Wedding People) has a protagonist who is 38, the age I turned a few weeks ago. She’s approaching the middle of her life, and maybe that means I am, too.

I feel like I’ve been reading and I’m just now looking up, hearing scenes from my life.

I’ve always been the youngest in the room. Adopting Joseph at a young age meant we were always the young ones in the parenting world. But now I’m realizing that time keeps, somehow, turning over. My grandma is gone. My grandpa is getting older. My parents—always the young ones themselves—are getting older too. How can this be? How can time be so present and so past all at once?

On the edge of this new year, I don’t know. But I want to be awake to it.

Present. Present. Present.

I can still feel the tidalwave of emotion when my mom brought the three kids in after I gave birth to Abram in April 2016—how they piled onto the hospital bed, and how gratitude flooded my body as I wrapped my tired, grateful arms around them, whispering I love you, I love you, I love you.

I felt a sense of completion. Of the next step into the great unknown. That somehow, across borders and bloodlines, we were here—buttoned up as family.

The fall of 2016 felt like a rug getting pulled from underneath me. I studied sociology in college and knew, even in my ignorance, that life in the U.S. wasn’t rainbows and butterflies, but I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how so many of the same people who professed Jesus and made me meals when I had babies and posted Bible verses on their Facebooks could be the same people who would vote for someone who mocked people with disabilities and bragged about sexually assaulting women and boasted cruelty and bigotry and racism.

I wish I could go back to who I was and hold that girl’s hand and whisper in her ear:

You are doing far better than you know. While your community may not understand how your fierceness undergirds your tenderness (or is it the other way around?), keep being soft and strong, Kayla.

Keep fighting for a better world for your children and other people’s children, too. Keep sitting with them, playing with them, and walking to the park with them with that giant double stroller and baby carrier.

Keep heading down to the basement and hosting that podcast about culture and the upside-down way of Jesus. Keep writing that little children’s book. Keep freelancing on the margins of your sleep-deprived life. Keep writing. It’ll pay off, I promise.

I know you feel small, or that you’re being made to feel small, but your power is what scares the people who don’t want to consider that maybe the faith your neighbors proclaim also means loving the neighbors that don’t think, act, or look like them. Loving the ones on the margins. Speaking up against injustice, cruelty, and racism.

Keep trusting the One who gives each breath. It doesn’t make life easy, but it makes life worth living. Keep raising compassionate kids.

And, Kayla? Don’t forget to have compassion for yourself, too.

What would you whisper into the ear of yourself ten years ago?

Today’s paid Year of Breath (keep reading below) features a guided journaling practice for writing a letter to who you were in 2016.

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Time Loops

When I think about the aches of the U.S. in 2016, it seems like we’re in a bit of a time loop in 2026.

I recently read Wrong Time, Wrong Place by Gillian McAllister. In this time-loop psychological thriller, the author explores a phenomenon called “hysterical strength”—and the immense power a mother can wield when she knows her child is in danger. In the postscript, she writes:

“Hysterical strength is a display of extreme strength by humans, beyond what is believed to be normal, usually occurring in life-or-death situations, particularly involving mothers. Anecdotal reports are of women lifting cars to rescue newborn babies, sometimes creating a huge force field of energy. Indeed, more supernatural reports have also been noted, such as time loops, though none has been proven to date. Sufferers often report déjà vu alongside episodes of hysterical strength.”

There were so many powerful lines about motherhood nestled into the novel, too:

• “Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases.”

• “The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.”

• “They, mother and son, are a zipper, slowly separating as the years rush by.”

• “Sometimes,” he says gently, when she’s finished, “the emotions of living something the first time prevent us from seeing the true picture, don’t they?” He rubs at his beard. “If I could go back – the things in my life that I would just stand and truly, fully witness, if I knew how they were going to turn out . . .”

• “Both phases of parenthood—the newborn years and the almost-adult ones—are bookended by sleep deprivation, though for different reasons.”

We have to reflect on what was so we can have a deeper understanding of what is and what may be. I know our lives are so urgent. The tyranny of now presses down on us with algorithms and schedules and notifications. More, always more.

But as I reflect on 2016 and live into 2026, I wonder if being a student of history—recent and ancient, personal and societal, might help us be more rooted as we live in these uprooted times. Might it help us choose lives of love, imperfectly but courageously, one breath at a time?

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Borrow this Prayer

from page 141 of To Light Their Way

O God of justice, God of truth,
We come to You on this day
To honor the life and legacy
Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And to commit our hearts
To building the beloved community
He dreamed about.

O Lord, through Dr. King,
You taught us, and are still teaching us,
What it is to stand with our oppressed
Brothers and sisters.
For whatever affects one directly
Affects all indirectly.

Lord, we thank You for Dr. King’s leadership
Against the scourge of racism
And for the ways his nonviolent teachings
Reverberate through our hearts today.

We lament the ways
We have taken his quotes out of context
And ignored the greater picture
Of his mission and ministry of social change.

We walk in the paths Dr. King
Cleared out for us,
And yet we know many weeds
Still need to be pulled.

Help us yank the violence of racism
By the root from our hearts
And our systems.

He had a dream for his children, Lord,
And we lament the ways the dream
Is yet to be fulfilled.

Help us teach our children about Dr. King
As a man whose work was propelled
By his love for You, Lord.
And help our children know
That this work is not over.
May our children know the cost
Of speaking out for justice and mercy—
Friends, status, even nights in jail—
Because being obedient to Your Spirit
May scare the powerful.

Lord, help our kids know that
Speaking up against racism
And working for justice
May cost them lots of somethings,
But it will never cost their souls.
If the moral arc of the universe
Is bent toward justice,
May You ignite in our children
Flexibility and prophetic imagination
To see Your Kingdom come.
May it be so, that our earth
Reflects how it is in heaven.

Lord, the fight against racism
Starts at home.
Help our family live in mutuality,
Knowing that the good of all—
Black, indigenous, people of color—
Is tied up in our well-being,
That nobody is free
Until we all are free.

May we honor the work of Dr. King
And countless other women and men
Fighting for civil rights,
Yesterday and today,
By not shying away from the contact burns
It takes to keep the fires of freedom
Burning in our hearts.

For many, many tomorrows,
Lord, we pray that our parenting
And the nonviolent choices our family makes
With our speech, our money, our votes
Would honor our neighbor.

Protect us, Lord, from the lure of traps,
What Dr. King warned of—spiritual doom.
Help us remember dawn will come.
As Dr. King reminded us from the psalmist,
Sorrow and despair are born at night,
But morning always follows.
Let us not lose hope.

Help us do what we can
With the tools we have
To cultivate paths of peace and righteousness.
We honor the committed, courageous work
Of not only MLK
But the advocates and activists
Working tirelessly today
For a more just world for all people
In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let justice roll down like water
And righteousness like a mighty stream.
May we live as parents and children
Who enter this work with You
With urgency and sustenance from the
Living Water,
From a well that won’t run dry.

O Lord, as we honor this day,
The day of Dr. King’s birth,
We lament that this nonviolent minister
Was murdered as he lived out a gospel of love.

May we remember and not forget
That our actions as colaborers with
Christ, rooted in love,
Will be a threat to those who want to do it the old way,
Who love power and money over justice and humanity.

When given the choice, may our children
Know to choose community.
May they choose the love of neighbor
That flows out of the love of God—
A love that overcomes.
A love that, as Dr. King said,
Is the most durable power in the world.

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Recommended Reads

My friend lives in the Twin Cities. Please read her post about how to pray and come alongside Minnesota in this moment:

“Friends are staying home—U.S. citizens who do not feel safe leaving the house because their skin is brown and ICE is detaining countless citizens. Restaurants and businesses are closed everywhere, or doors are locked to keep employees and customers safe. Our kids’ schools keep emailing updates about safety procedures and plans to protect students at school and on buses. Minneapolis, St. Paul, and other school districts are now offering virtual learning because of the threat posed to students’ safety by the federal government’s actions.”

My friend shared an honest post about being a mother in these times:

“The piece I actually want to write is about my word for the year, but every time I think about doing a deep dive into my own New Year self-reflection, I can’t seem to muster up the energy.

A mother shot in the head. A teacher pulled from her car. A teenager pushed to the ground in the middle of Target. Every time I dare to scan the news I watch some version of the same footage: untrained men in guns terrorizing American citizens in the name of making our country safe. Then we’ve got Elon’s AI creating deepfake sexual images of children, and that same AI being integrated into Pentagon networks. Iran. Venezuela. Redacted files. Everywhere we turn: corruption, greed, sexual predators, racism, violence.

I get on Voxer and attempt to make sense of the senseless with friends who are doing the same. All of us simply trying not to fall into a pit of despair, trying to do as Mother Teresa advised: go home and love our families.”

Breath Prayer

Monday

INHALE: Compassionate Christ,

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Thousands of years ago, a baby was born, and the ruthless, cowardly king felt so threatened by this little one’s power, so terrified of losing the loyalty of and control over those he ruled, that he ordered the killing of all baby boys in and around Bethlehem.

But Herod’s empire of fear was not—and will never be—a match for Christ’s kingdom of love.

When the Magi saw the stunning star that led them to Jerusalem, they made their way to Herod’s palace to learn more about the “newborn king.” Herod told them to report back after they found the child. But after meeting Jesus, the Magi realized the King’s malicious intent, so they refused to return.

Enraged, Herod unleashed violence against the most vulnerable.

We still see Herods—those who cling to power at any cost—in our world today. But even when it seems like evil reigns victorious, it will never have the final word.

What others intend for harm, God works toward redemption. The world may rule through fear and control, but the Way of Jesus restores and redeems.

As Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

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Out of the Depths, I Cry

Psalm 130 ends with “I have put my hope in his word.”

But it begins in the depths of sorrow: “Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord; Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.”

As we embrace another new year, we often look at what was so that we can more surely enter into what will be.

Our paths are rarely linear, woven with threads that twist and turn unexpectedly.

The timeless tale of the Magi from Matthew 2:1-12 paints a vivid picture of this truth. These wise travelers from the East didn’t follow a straightforward path to find Jesus.

Guided by dreams and stars, their journey was filled with royal encounters and unforeseen detours.

Feeling Uncertain or Lost is Okay

Their experience teaches us a comforting lesson about our winding paths: feeling uncertain or lost is okay. We don’t need to have everything figured out.

Sometimes, the most profound moments in life come from taking a courageous turn that leads us away from our meticulously-planned routes.

King Herod, steeped in ulterior motives, directed the Magi to report back the child's whereabouts. But after being divinely warned in a dream, the Magi chose not to return to Herod, opting to leave “by another road.”

Their decision to embrace alternative paths challenges us as we think about our own journeys. The Magi were willing to have their assumptions challenged and plans changed.

The same is true for us: We don’t have to have all the answers or an obstacle-free path because hope is what empowers our journey.

Often, the straight-and-narrow ways we assume are set before us are not our only options.

As we go forth in faith, we’ll have opportunities to decide between conforming to external expectations and following God’s path.

Following the Spirit’s stirrings may lead us down twists and turns that lead us out of our comfort zones but fit us into a divine path of truth, justice, and peace.

We don’t have to know where we’re going to know that God is with us.

Isaiah 43:16-21 testifies to this truth with a powerful promise: God makes a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

This prophetic assurance paints a vivid picture of God’s active presence in our lives: creating paths where none seem to exist and inviting us to embrace the new things God is doing.

It’s a divine invitation to move forward, learn from the past, and step into new possibilities.

Refer a friend

We Are Never Alone

Like the Magi, we are often called to take unexpected paths and find new ways. Every journey carries risks and revelations, but God actively carves paths in the wilderness, guiding us through uncharted territories with the promise of making all things new.

Each movement forward in faith brings us closer to where we truly belong. This perspective empowers us to face the uncertainties of our journey with courage, knowing God is with us in the detours.

In this new year, may you find comfort knowing that, like the Magi, a light will guide you home.

Rest in the hope that you never truly go alone—the love that knows your name goes alongside you and before you.

Let this assurance fill you with peace and courage, open to the new and unexpected paths that God may reveal in the days to come.

(originally published in A Sanctified Art’s devotional)

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Blessing

Breath Prayer

INHALE: Each twist and turn

EXHALE: Invites me to follow You

January Reading Guide

The January 2026 reading guide is an invitation to begin the year with intention.

Each week includes thoughtfully chosen readings and simple prayers drawn from To Light Their Way and Every Season Sacred, offering steady companionship for the days when the world feels uncertain. You don’t need to be consistent—just willing to show up and let these words meet you where you are.

January 2026 Reading Plan

213KB ∙ PDF file

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How to Stay Rooted in 2026

As 2026 unfolds, it’s already clear that this year will ask something of us.

The ground beneath our feet feels far less stable than we’d like. Staying rooted in Christ in a year like this means we return, again and again, to the One who holds us when everything else feels uncertain.

How can we choose love over despair? How can we be people of courage and compassion, even in small, seemingly ordinary ways?

One way to nurture that rootedness is by journeying intentionally through the year with the full, paid version of this newsletter: Year of Breath.

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Each week offers a gentle rhythm of weekly breath prayers, readings, reflection questions to do on your own or share with others, playlists, and embodied practices designed to help you stay grounded and connected to God in the midst of real life.

You don’t have to do it all. Year of Breath is a companion for the road, helping you take a breath, stay connected to Christ, and remember who you are and what matters as the year unfolds and you love your neighbor as yourself.

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Recommended Reading

I’ll be reading Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World (Daily Hope and Strength to Resist the Rise of Tyranny) by this year. She is a favorite modern-day theologian of mine, and I so appreciate her wisdom, especially in these times.

About the book: “In Liturgies for Resisting Empire, Cuban American theologian and writer Kat Armas provides a roadmap for Christians seeking a countercultural way of living that prioritizes community and humanity over dominance and power.

Armas combines spiritual practices and biblical theology to help us create authentic belonging to God, ourselves, each other, and creation. She begins by examining how empire affects us daily through its pervasive ideologies and systems of control…she explores how the New Testament church resisted Roman imperial power while building communities centered on God's kingdom values rather than worldly dominance.

This book offers hope for Christians struggling to live faithfully within systems of exploitation and oppression. Armas provides practical spiritual disciplines, community-building strategies, and theological frameworks that empower readers to resist empire's dehumanizing effects while cultivating spaces of authentic belonging and liberation.”

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Breath Prayers for this Week

This week’s breath prayers are short companions meant to be returned to throughout the day. You might pray them while making coffee, sitting in the carpool line, scrolling the news, or lying awake at night.

Monday

INHALE: There is no corner of this earth

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The Internet is, quite simply, bizarre. (If you’re a milennial or older, you still remember the analog days. Be kind, rewind!) Those who are much smarter than I am can tell you about all the 0s and 1s and how these interwebs all work, so that I can press keys at my dining room table that end up with you. But here I am. Here you are. Real humans, real beating hearts, real blood and bone, sharing the same air, just trying to figure it out.

There’s something about a new year that makes me feel extra existential. It doesn’t help that artificial intelligence is growing at an alarming rate, doubling in capabilities and possibilities second by second.

This is Your Life

There’s nothing inherently magical about the new year. Time is constantly turning over—ever-changing and never captured. But there’s something about the resetting of the calendar that makes me wonder: Am I who I want to be?

When we’re honest enough with ourselves and brave enough to go there, we stand in the middle of space and time and ask:

Who do I want to be? And what choices do I need to make to make that happen? How does this align with my identity as a follower of the Prince of Peace?

A long time ago, Switchfoot wrote a song called This is Your Life (and yes, of course it’s on this week’s playlist!):

Powers that be have always been set on war and destruction. But the way of God is the way of life—the way that puts us on the path of peace.

“…turn from evil and do good…seek peace and pursue it.”

1 Peter 3:11

January Reading Guide

I hope this reading guide helps you move into 2026 with intention.

January 2026 Reading Plan

213KB ∙ PDF file

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Print or save this one-page PDF that will walk you through reflections and prayers for each week of January 2026.

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Who Are We, Really?

I want to be a hopeful person, but when my screentime spirals and I feel overwhelmed at just about everything, I start to wonder:

What happens when we willingly trade our personhood for a life of screens?

It’s happening little by little, but as I take a few steps back and try to suss out the whole of history, our technological advances are happening beyond our control, a pandemic is growing all around us, and we’ve willingly decided not to vaccinate.

Now, I’ll stop you right there: I’m not a Luddite. As much as I dream of pulling a Wendell Berry and clanking away on a typewriter, my work is on The Cloud. So are many of our family photos. I have more Apple devices than I care to admit, and I even (gasp) have Amazon Prime. I have apps on my phone that I’m sure are tracking every movement of every datapoint.

None of that makes me or you inherently less human.

My thoughts, though, as we breathe in another new year, are that I’m worried about us. About me. About you. Not because technology is the Big Bad, but because it’s allowing us to disconnect from what makes us human—our souls. Our need for connection, for awe, for love, for delight, for what it is to be with.

So much of this is just…an illusion. Something that feels so very real, yet in the blink of a datacenter light, all of this could be just… gone. But it’s so convincing, isn’t it?

Why bother with believing in a God when I have anything I could possibly need in the palm of my hand? Why make art if a prompt can do it for us?

I’m thinking of these things partly because of what I’ve been reading and watching over Christmas break:

• Pluribus (show on AppleTV)

  • “In a world overtaken by a mysterious wave of forced happiness, Carol Sturka, one of the immune few, must uncover what’s really going on - and save humanity from its artificial bliss.”

• Stranger Things (show on Netflix)

  • “Set in the 1980s, the series centers on the residents of the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, after a young girl with psychokinetic abilities, named Eleven, opens a gateway between Earth and a hostile alternate dimension known as the Upside Down at a nearby human experimentation facility.”

• A Wrinkle in Time (book)

  • “Late one night, three otherworldly creatures appear and sweep Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe away on a mission to save Mr. Murray, who has gone missing while doing top-secret work for the government. They travel via tesseract—a wrinkle that transports one across space and time—to the planet Camazotz, where Mr. Murray is being held captive. There they discover a dark force that threatens not only Mr. Murray but the safety of the whole universe.”

• Ready Player One (book; I started reading it because my son who is in 9th grade is reading it for his lit class)

  • “In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself.”

• The Holy Longing (book)

  • “In The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser probes the question “What is spirituality?”, cutting through the misunderstanding and confusion that can often surround this subject with his trademark clarity. Using examples and stories relevant for today, and with great sensitivity to modern challenges to religious faith, he explains the essentials of spiritual life, including the importance of community worship, the imperatives surrounding social action, and the centrality of the Incarnation, to outline a Christian spirituality that reflects the yearning and search for meaning at the core of the human experience.”

There are so many overlays to these works. Each of them is rich in depth, and I would say they invite us to ask questions (instead of giving us answers). (I also loved these reflections from my Internet friend Nick via Threads.)

They bring up the banality of evil, the idea of willingly trading our agency for power or comfort, good vs evil, the ones on the margins making change, fighting for humanity even though we are flawed, technology/AI, time and space…I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Father Thomas Keating wrote a lot about the human condition, and I feel like each of these, though not from a Christian perspective (except Rolheiser), circles back to the same ideas of there being something more.

Of overcoming evil with good.

Of choosing each other, no matter the cost.

Of believing that life—real, messy, complicated life together—is worth fighting for.

Borrow this Prayer

from Every Season Sacred

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Creator God, You breathed us into being out of dirt and dust. You are not done with the forming and fashioning of who we are and who we are becoming. In You, each of us is invited into infinite possibilities for who we might become.

Protect us from influences that whisper lies, distorting the divine shape of our hearts and minds, bodies and souls. God, we know You are forever speaking into the contours and crevices of our lives. Carve mirrors into our hearts so we might examine and reflect on who and what we have allowed to form our days and our lives.

O God, You are full of mercy, not manipulation. You are a God of order, not chaos. In your generosity, You give us the freedom to be formed. You do not micromanage, exploit, or control our lives with divine algorithms.

When we have allowed our false selves to become hardened in the fires of life, call us back so we may return to being formed by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self- control.

Soften our harsh edges, and form us into Your image, through Christ alone. Amen.

Thin as Air

I’m 99 percent sure some of the prayers recently read before some events at one of my kids’ schools were written by AI. Where does that leave us? If a soul doesn’t write a prayer, can the prayer still have meaning? Have value?

For far too long, it has seemed like headline holds a new horror, one I feel, and in many ways am, powerless to change. I grew up in the 90s, when the messaging taught us we could be anything we wanted to be, yet… it’s not true. I was also told, time and time and time again, that the people on top are the good guys.

But I’m looking around and thinking…no one is coming to save us. Because we are eating ourselves. Yikes. That sounds terrible.

As much as I’m painting a picture of all of this, I’m not falling into a pit of despair. I’m fighting every day the lure of despair, the trap of cynicism.

I refuse to wear the mantle of doom and gloom. I have hope. I have hope in a Creator of the universe who reminds me, in millions of small (and sometimes significant) ways, that this is not all there is.

That connection is worth creating, even though relationships are messy. That peace is worth pursuing, even though the world runs on war. That we need to be people of history and imagination, of wonder and awe, of grace and mercy, of hope and heart. We need to bear witness to the suffering and make space for joy.

Paul uses the idea of all of us being part of a bigger body, each doing what we can to be Christ in a world aching for something real to hold onto.

I guess the question for all of us is…are you who you want to be? How might you be more fully who you’ve been made to be all along?

Rule of Life

from Every Season Sacred

A rule of life can give you a framework for significant decisions (Should I take this job? Should we move? Are we ready to become foster parents?) to small ones (Should we host our neighbors for a barbecue? How much money should we spend on birthday gifts? Should we sign our child up for soccer?).

Returning to what matters most can lead you to freedom when you’re stuck.

Bishop Michael Curry points out that the word rule is from the Latin regula, which “suggests a gentle pattern or framework—not a hard and fast rule. This is a way to create tangible habits that support our heart’s intentions.”

When you sketch out a rule of life, you create scaffolding to give your family stability as you build your life together. When you need discernment in making choices (both the everyday ones and the monumental ones), this gives you a place to turn to remind you of what’s most important—and why. It might help to consider your rule of life an always-changing, ever-evolving values statement.

Creating a rule of life is a spiritual practice that goes back thousands of years to Saint Benedict, and it has been a helpful practice for Christians across tradition, denomination, and background ever since.

I don’t know about you, but my family life is loud, and our rhythms of everyday life couldn’t feel further from the lifestyle of Benedictine monks.

Thankfully, we can distill and borrow the essence of Benedict’s seventy-three-chapter rule to help us order our life together “around the values, practices and relationships that keep us open and available to God for the work of spiritual transformation that only God can bring about. Simply put, a rule of life provides structure and space for our growing,” writes Ruth Haley Barton.

Take time to reflect on your own or with your family to determine what you hold most dear so you can order your days, develop household habits, and intentionally integrate thoughtful rhythms to reflect your values—for whatever season of life your family is in.

A family rule of life boils down to two questions:

Who do we want our family to be?

How do we want to live so we become more who we want to be?

A Simple Guide to Create a 2026 Rule of Life

Paid subscribers to Year of Breath will get access to a gentle guide for creating a rule of life, along with breath prayers for each day of the week, a playlist that goes along with this week’s themes, reflection questions, a prayer practice, and more.

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Breath Prayers to Start the Year

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Take a breath.

Release the shoulds. The guilt. The pressure. The shame. The worry. The fear. The exhaustion that comes with another year.

We can’t tell the future. We don’t know what is to come. If 2025 is any indication, we’re entering another year of political strife, war, and injustice. There is so much pain. There is so we can’t control, this is true.

And.

You can release what was never yours to hold.

You can release the idea that you have to be everything to everyone.

You don’t have to twist into someone who is somehow better or holier for God to hear your every prayer, to count your every breath.

As 2026 comes into focus, you don’t have to shift and change into a perfect new version of you for the unchanging God of the universe to call you beloved.

A Prayer for the New Year

from page 139 of To Light Their Way

O God, creator of time
And keeper of seasons,
No gods were formed before You,
Nor will there be any after You.
You hold it all,
And in You alone all things are made.

As we look at the year behind us,
Give us space to process the paths that got us here
So that we may have vision for what lies ahead.

We ask for hearts to remember
The celebrations and sorrows
Of our family’s passing year.

Help us reflect on the good
Shared between us,
Of the tiny moments
Sparkling with joy,
Of the celebrations
Twinkling with hope.
May these joys
Energize us as we look to the New Year.

And help us, too, reflect on the hurts
Shared between us,
Of the small disappointments
Nestled in our hearts,
Of the mistakes
Hanging in the balance.
May these sorrows
Teach us as we look to the New Year.

As we watch time tick by
And count down to a new year,
We remember that You are a God
Of fresh starts and clean slates.
And what a gift it is
That Your mercies are new each morning
And that we don’t have to wait for a new year
To begin again.

As we look to the New Year,
We thank You for the little ones underfoot
As the ball drops and the music starts.
Thank You for living room dance parties
With young and old
And toasts with sparkling juice,
Kisses on the forehead,
And I love yous.

O God, You hold all eternity in Your hands.
Thank You for songs to sing
And moments of quiet too.

May we reflect on the year behind us
As we look ahead to the year in front of us.

Gathering the Stones

The end of the year invites us into reflection, but amidst the chaos of Christmas and the whirlwind of winter break, it can feel daunting to take stock of what was when what is feels overwhelming enough.

For the past few years, I’ve shared a printable PDF as a guided journal for you (and your family) to reflect on the year that has passed. Just use the password “season” when you click the link.

If you have a copy of Every Season Sacred¹ (and I sure hope you do), turn to page 133 for the “Gathering the Stones” chapter, which is in the WINTER section and is written with the New Year in mind.

You can also head to page 296 for a guide on how to pray the Examen, an ancient reflective practice that fits well with the end of not only a year but also a season, month, or even a day.

I wrote Every Season Sacred because it’s the book I needed—one I could turn to over and over throughout the year, with nuanced resources for my actual life.

I wanted reflections that didn’t turn away from the world’s pain but also didn’t crumble into cynicism.

One I could turn to when I needed a dose of stubborn, gritty, messy hope. So I could connect with God, my family, and my neighbors in a way that felt real, not forced (or fluffy).

If you have a copy, I hope it helps you integrate a couple more rhythms of grace into this complicated world.

Start the New Year with Intention

The beginning of a new year can stir up all kinds of things—hope, weariness, grief, longing. In the paid portion of Year of Breath, we make room for all of it.

Each week includes: fresh breath prayers for every day, guided reflection questions, a simple spiritual practice, Scripture, a playlist, a phone wallpaper, and a benediction.

My hope is that this space helps you begin the year from a place of peace in a shouting world—a little corner of the internet where you can breathe in your belovedness—and to return to the One who gives each breath again and again as the months go on.

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Breath Prayer for this Week

Monday
INHALE: Help me release the pressure

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At one point, the dubious, doubting detecting Benoit Blanc says that church is for fairy tales, for telling stories:

“It's like someone has shone a story at me that I do not believe.”

Father Jud replies:

“I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true? Something we can’t access any other way, except storytelling?”

This interaction reminded me of the “Stories We Tell” chapter in the Winter section of Every Season Sacred. (And if you watch the movie, the interaction with Father Jud on the phone is worth the whole movie. Jonny and I are still thinking about it.)

If You Missed It

• Advent Week 1: Mary’s Yes & Your Belovedness | Find your place in the Advent quilt. (And December reading guide!)

• Advent Week 2: The Waiting Room | God meets you in the overwhelm and chaos of real life.

• Advent Week 3: Unexpected Joy | When December feels chaotic, imperfect, or nothing like you planned.

The Stories We Tell

from page 112 of Every Season Sacred (50 percent off and often has next-day shipping available!)

When I think back on holidays past, I reflect on the stories we share.

I feel a pang for what was and what never will be again, and at the same time feel a swell of gratitude for the gift of stories we can treasure time and again.

As families, we tell and retell stories, passing down bits of our history—reflections of our humanity—to the generations that come behind us. Our family stories make us who we are, helping us understand our place in the world.

Within my immediate family, my Nativity nightmare has become one of lore. Decades have passed, but every Christmas, the story of how I lost the narrator role—again— is somehow brought up. My mom can’t stop laughing about the slight, and I can’t overcome the indignity of it all.

As we observe Advent and approach Christmas, our families are filled with stories we can’t help but share.

As the family of Christ, we set aside time to tell one of the greatest stories of all time: the one where Love came down and God became flesh, entering the world in the form of a baby.

It’s a riveting story: a cast of unexpected characters, a cosmic Incarnation, the culmination of a million smaller stories building until they burst into a night that changed history, its reverberations echoing into eternity.

When I first started dating my husband, he was taken aback by how my family shares stories when we get together, how we laugh at the same memories as we gather around the table, passing the peace in the form of memories.

We trot out big stories about life events and vacations past, and we share little stories too, about seemingly mundane things that have been told and retold so many times that the telling itself has become funnier and more exciting than the original inspiration for the tale.

We’ve been married for fifteen years, and now Jonny knows all the tales by heart (he is the star in some stories of his own).

“When a story starts, you can see everyone in the room join into the common memory,” Jonny told me once. “There’s no hesitation or doubt about the details— the story has been honed; we all follow the beat together. No matter how often we tell the stories, they never seem boring or like old news. We become even closer knit as we remember together, enjoying the laughter and reflection of sharing family stories.”

As we raise our kids, we create our own stories, passing them down at the dinner table as we pass the mashed potatoes.

Wright says, “Family stories do more than cement us together in remembered intimacy. Our stories also point to the values we hold dear.”

I look back to childhood Christmas celebrations at my grandparents’ house and remember the intimacy of my grandmother’s invitation into the laundry room, the way she made me feel special and seen as she placed a ring of garland on my head. I remember the value of being together, of finding my part in a bigger story.

When the terrifying and wonderful angels appeared above that field so long ago, telling the ordinary shepherds a story of splendor that seemed almost too good to be true, the shepherds were in awe. They had to see this Baby for themselves—they had to find their place in the story. And once they did, they couldn’t help but tell and retell what happened, sharing with everyone the glory of the story they had a front-row seat to.

As for Mary, she rocked the fresh Baby, treasuring up all the tiny miracles that had culminated into the cosmic Grace she held in her arms. She held the greatest stories of all in her heart “and thought about them often” (Luke 2:19).

We hold our stories in the heartbeats of our days. We think about them often. We share them repeatedly, telling them to our children. As we do, we live into who we are and find beauty in who we’re with.

As you approach Christmas, take time to marvel at the stories of Jesus’ birth.

Read Luke 2:1-20 aloud with your children.

Listen to an audio retelling of the Gospel account.

Attend a Nativity play.

And when you find at least a sliver of a silent night, ask Jesus—Immanuel, God with us—how your story fits into God’s most extraordinary story.

Keep Reading

Pray this With Your Family

from page 94 of Every Season Sacred

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Before the beginning of everything, Jesus,
You were there. We celebrate this beautiful
mystery year after year, remembering Your
birth that happened so many years ago. You
are the King of Kings, and Your glory is
over all things.
Help all we do, all we create, and
all we say to honor You and show love to
everyone we meet. Help us to be brave and
to make choices that honor You, ourselves,
and others. We love You, Jesus. Amen.

Borrow this Prayer

from page 113 of Every Season Sacred

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O Christ, through You we enter a sacred circle of time. As we anticipate the birth of Jesus, please orient our hearts so we might tune our days to You.

As we journey through Advent, renew us from the inside out. Awaken us to a deeper sense of time that is both now and not yet.

In Your Incarnation, we hear echoes of eternity. May these sacred reverberations
form our family as we journey deeper into knowing You. Fashion us to reflect Your
character, O God who became a vulnerable baby, born in a barn.

As we approach Christmas, help us to subvert the empires of consumerism and consumption, living in the light of Your glorious love, time after time.

Amen.

A Prayer for Christmas Morning

from page 180 of To Light Their Way (453 reviews on Amazon, averaging 5 stars…thank you!!! It’s also 40 percent off right now with overnight shipping!)

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O Christ Jesus, joy of the world,
We celebrate Your arrival—
Word made flesh—
On this Christmas morn.

O God incarnate,
As we celebrate and watch our children
Squeal with delight
With sleepy eyes and tousled hair
Or grin in spite of themselves,
May we wonder what Mary felt
As she watched her baby grow.

We know we are in but a flash in time.
We want to hold these moments.
We want to store them up in our hearts.

And as we watch our children,
Warm with last night’s sleep,
We marvel that You,
Maker of heaven and earth,
Entered this world as one of us—
A cosmic King made vulnerable infant,
Swaddled in strips of cloth—
And You let us hold You in our arms.

O Prince of Peace,
In our celebrations and rejoicing,
We watch the light break in,
And we pray, too, for those who are
Alone this morning,
Who ache for the gift of together
And spend the day in quiet—
No melodies of little voices,
No choruses of laughter at the table.
Comfort the lonely, and bring joy to the hurting.
Fill the hungry, and lift the lowly.

And may we know, O Redeemer,
That this work of peace on earth
Begins in us.
O Spirit of the living God,
As our children pull presents
From under the tree,
We know these paper boxes
Are but temporary joys
In the light of Your glory.

We thank You for the good gift
Of Jesus,
And we thank You that
You have given and still offer now
Gifts of love and joy,
Of peace and patience,
Gifts of kindness and goodness,
Of faithfulness and self-control.

O God of mercy,
We rejoice, for on this morning
We celebrate the day of Christ’s arrival—
The day that changed everything.
And we give all the glory to You
Forevermore.

A Playlist for Everyone

ICYMI: This playlist goes along with the Holidays & Holy Days section of To Light Their Way.

(Pssst: Keep reading for a brand-new 22-song curated playlist just for this 2025 Christmas week!)

For When Life Feels Chaotic

from page 183 of To Light Their Way

INHALE: My heart seeks You.

EXHALE: Don’t let me stray.

Feel your heartbeat. Remember God is near. Rest in the truth that you—and your kids— are known and held in the chaos. This is from Psalm 119:10.

Breath Prayers for this Week

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My birthday fell on a Saturday this year, but Madeleine L’Engle didn’t call this decade the “tired thirties” for nothing. We had a 7 a.m. wakeup call for an all-day competitive Lego league coding competition for our nine-year-old son, and early Sunday morning, our family was slated to do the Advent candle-lighting and liturgy at church before hustling right into the children’s Christmas musical.

No grand weekend getaways were on the horizon, to be sure.

Instead, my husband quietly planned a little midweek birthday surprise on a Tuesday night. He coordinated all the school pickups (an Olympian feat), arranged childcare for all four kids, and came home ready to whisk me away to whatever he had dreamed up.

But when he walked in the door, he didn’t find a woman ready for a festive evening. He found a house goblin/writing troll/author gremlin.

The final (quite extensive) batch of edits for my new book was due, and I had completely lost track of time as I tried to pull everything together. I was still recovering from a stomach bug that had taken me out a few days before. After a miserable week of health chaos, we had hosted his staff Christmas party in our home Saturday night, and by 4 a.m. on Sunday, my veins felt like ice as I emptied every last bit of content from my stomach. (Norovirus? Food poisoning? The world will never know.)

Unshowered, hunched over my laptop, typing furiously, he reminded me of The Big Surprise. I rushed to hop in the shower and make myself presentable. It was a whirlwind, and by the time we stepped outside, freezing rain hit our faces as we made our way to the minivan, which smelled unmistakably like rotting green bean casserole because, as it turns out, the leftovers my mom sent home with us had been forgotten in the backseat and only thawed enough to release their full power that night.

I plugged my nose. We carried on.

Hallmark dreams die hard.

In the parking lot, Jonny gave the big reveal: “We’re going to a wreath-making class!”

I imagined crisp branches of Iowa pine, fresh evergreen sprigs, rolls of ribbon, a smattering of holly berries, maybe even a little mistletoe for good measure. I could practically hear Nat King Cole crooning as we sipped hot cocoa by a crackling fire.

We walked into the art center. “We’re here for the wreath-making!” Jonny proclaimed. The receptionist raised an eyebrow but politely directed us down the hall.

We followed the hallway…into a fluorescent-lit basement ceramics room. A few older women sat quietly in folding chairs.

“Welcome!” the instructor said, dusting clay off her hands. “Did you bring a plan for what you’re going to sculpt today? For your ceramic wreath?”

Jonny and I looked at each other—and burst out laughing.

This was decidedly not the wreath-making class he envisioned. There was no pine, no holly, no hot cocoa. Just slabs of clay, a handful of enthusiastic women armed with snowman cookie cutters, and the two of us who had absolutely no idea what we were doing.

Was it what we expected? Not even close.
Was it magical all the same? Absolutely.

We got our hands messy with clay, looked at each other over and over with that Is this real life? expression, and found ourselves laughing more that night than we had in weeks.

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Consider it Joy

Even when we’re most depleted, even when the season doesn’t meet our expectations…there is joy to be found, right here in the middle of our messy, complicated, ordinary lives.

Year after year, time turns over, and Advent reminds us that the sacred rarely arrives as we imagine. The miracle seldom unfolds on our terms.

God slips into our stories not when we’re polished and ready, but when we’re tired, stretched thin, slightly nauseous, and riding around in a van that smells like green beans.

A Messiah born not in a palace, but in a barn. (Luke 2:7)
Not to royalty, but to a teenage girl in Nazareth. (Luke 1:26–27)

The joy of Advent is not found in the perfect moment—it’s found in the surprise. In the laughter that breaks through the mess. In the unexpected tenderness of the life we’re actually living. In the God who keeps showing up in fluorescent basements and chaotic Tuesdays and ordinary people.

Again and again, in these early chapters of the Christmas story, God meets our humanity with divine reassurance: I am with you. I am doing something new. You are not alone.

• When Mary asked, “How will this be?” the angel replied, “Do not be afraid… the Holy Spirit will come upon you” (Luke 1:34-35).

• When Joseph wrestled with confusion, he was told, “Do not be afraid… for what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20).

• When the shepherds trembled, the angel offered the same words: “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy” (Luke 2:10).

If your December is not shaping up to be picture-perfect, if your days feel more frenzied than festive, if you’re squinting to find the holy amid the chaos…

Maybe that’s exactly where Advent joy is unfolding for you—in the unexpected places where “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5).

This week, may you recognize the divine in your own unexpected places.

May you laugh in the mess like Sarah, who discovered that even unexpected joy can be holy (Genesis 21:6). May you soften to joy that sneaks in sideways. And may you remember that God is still choosing the overlooked, the ordinary, the tired, the tender-hearted—choosing you—to carry Love into the world.

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Borrow this Prayer

adapted from Every Season Sacred

O Christ who dwells in us and among us,
Help us to be people of courage and vulnerability.
Jesus, You went first, breaking through
To our world as an infant,
Swaddled and held by a mother.

We cannot begin to fathom
The mystery of the Incarnation,
But we delight in the awe of Your mystery.

Your cosmic love transcends space and time,
And You are worthy of every praise.
In this Advent season,
Ignite in us holy wonder and sacred imagination.

May we stay awake to the divine offering of connection
That You so generously give us.

May we feel safe, known, and loved, never forgetting
That You’re always pursuing us and
Making a way where there is no way.

You know what it’s like to be carried
And to be the One who carries.
May we take time to reflect on
This beautiful mystery.

Amen.

December Reading Guide: You’re Right on Time

If Advent has felt a little messy, rushed, or nothing like you imagined… take a breath.
You’re not behind. You’re not too late. You’re not doing it wrong.

Advent is for real life—for parents juggling schedules, for people recovering from stomach bugs and long workweeks, for anyone longing for a moment of quiet in a noisy world. And this December Reading Guide is here to offer you a gentle exhale, not another thing to add to your list.

December 2025 Reading Guide

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Simple weekly readings and prayers for Advent

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• It’s completely free.

• All you need are your copies of Every Season Sacred and To Light Their Way (on sale here).

• Use what serves you and leave the rest.

Join us right where you are. No catching up. No guilt. No perfection required.

Just hope. Just joy. Just a tiny reminder that Advent is still unfolding, and there’s room for you here.

A Few of My Favorite Things

In honor of my birthday, here are a few winter little luxuries I’m currently enjoying, in case you need ideas for someone on your holiday shopping list (or a few things to put on your own wishlist):

• Shimmer Multi-Purpose Dry Oil

• Holiday Woodfire Soy Candle

• Warm & Soft Cashmere Blend Socks

• Vanilla Creme Lip Butter Balm

What would you add to this list?

Leave a comment

Advent Week 3 Breath Prayers for the Week

Monday

INHALE: Open my heart,

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Monday

“I waited patiently for the Lord to help me, and he turned to me and heard my cry.” (Psalm 40:1)

We were still coming down from hosting Thanksgiving with my husband’s family when we celebrated our daughter Eliza’s tenth birthday. She is incredible, and raising her is a privilege that stretches beyond space and time. And yet, as is often the case with significant disability and milestones, joy and ache sit right next to each other. Birthdays and holidays only seem to magnify both.

By Monday night, after picking up stray balloons and scraps of wrapping paper and collapsing on the couch, I noticed our eldest son wasn’t acting like himself. He’d been a little off for a couple of days, but now he had a fever—and with his chronic illness, fever is never “just a fever.” With his chronic illness, anything over 101 sends us straight to the ER.

So at 10:30 p.m., we drove to the hospital through the piling snow. And then we sat in the waiting room—the beginning of what would become a very long night of waiting.

Under the fluorescent lights, my teenage son sat beside me—shoulders broad as he stretches toward adulthood—and yet I could see him at every age he’s ever been. The toddler who first called me Mom. The boy we prayed for and waited for through months of adoption paperwork in Nigeria. The kid who has already endured more waiting in his life than most adults.

Nurses and doctors moved in and out, ordering labs and chest x-rays, trying to piece together what his body was fighting. He handled each poke with a quiet steadiness that humbled me. Sometime in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the doctor came back: pneumonia. With strong antibiotics and fluids, we were allowed to monitor at home. To wait.

We made it home around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning.

Tuesday

“I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope.“ (Psalm 130:5)

Tuesday was long. Calls to the doctor. Waiting for the nurse to call me back. Temp checks. Medication. More waiting—waiting to see if the fever would break and then waiting to see if the fever would return. Waiting for the labs to shift, waiting to see if we were headed back to the ER.

So much of parenting a child with complex medical needs is simply waiting for the next thing—without knowing when the next thing will arrive, or what it will even be.

Wednesday

“He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless… those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” (Isaiah 40:29, 31)

By Wednesday afternoon, I picked up our middle schooler and immediately saw that something was wrong. He limped toward the car, tears in his eyes. A friend had landed on his foot at school. Ice. Ibuprofen. Elevation. And then the waiting—waiting to see if the swelling would go down, waiting to see if he could bear weight, waiting to see if this would resolve or if it was something more.

Sometimes the waiting is active. And sometimes it feels very, very helpless.

Thursday

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble… ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’“ (Psalm 46:1, 10)

Thursday brought Urgent Care for that foot. Waiting. More waiting. An X-ray.

We left with a boot and instructions to…wait.

That same night, I was at a neighbor’s house helping with their dog after a sudden family loss when I stepped outside and caught the sharp smell of natural gas. I texted a few neighbors: “Is this normal?” It wasn’t. So we waited for the energy company to show up. We waited while they checked it out. And on my way to Urgent Care, I got the call: a serious leak needed immediate repair.

Because of course. That’s how the week was going.

Friday

“Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us… to guide us to the path of peace.“ (Luke 1:78–79)

Friday morning, Eliza had a minor surgical procedure scheduled at the university hospital a couple of hours away. It was supposed to be at 10 a.m., but the night before, they called and told us to be there at eight instead. The reshuffling. The recalculating.

The making-sure-every-child-is-covered-in-love part of parenting that continues even when you’re running on fumes.

My husband Jonny took her. I stayed home so I could be close if our oldest—attempting his first full day of school all week—needed to come home.

After dropping the kids off at their schools, I stopped by the store to grab a few things.

He texted me when she went back: a quick five-minute procedure, IV sedation, no intubation. Still, my chest tightened. I needed something to do with my hands. Something to interrupt the spiraling what-ifs. Something to help my nervous system not collapse in on itself. I wandered into the book aisle. One spine caught my eye.

Nana Loves You.

This year marks my first Christmas season without my grandma—Nana to me, Great-Nana to my kids—and grief has been unexpectedly bubbling up in the corners of my heart, a flash here and there as we decorate trees and hang stockings, remembering how she made Christmas magical for us, year after year after year.

My eyes lingered on the title. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe I was dipping into magical thinking. But that little book felt like a glimmer of something…more.

Advent reminds us that we are not alone in our wait. There is more to this life than what you or I can see.

We wait. But we do not wait alone.

Advent: A Wait with Holy Anticipation

Advent doesn’t absolve the ache of the not-yet. Advent knows the waiting rooms of life—the ones with vinyl chairs and fluorescent lights and the what nows.

Advent is the season of holy anticipation, where the hope and the ache live in the same space.

Our youngest loves lighting the Advent candles—he practically vibrates with excitement—but it also makes the ache of waiting excruciating. “Why can’t Christmas be NOW?” he’ll ask.

Scripture speaks right into that tension:

• “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope.” (Psalm 130:5)

• “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

• “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5)

Because you—right now—are waiting for something too.

• Waiting for news.

• For relief.

• For clarity.

• For healing.

• For reconciliation.

• For a break.

• For breath.

• For something to finally shift.

• For someone you love to be okay.

• For you to be okay.

If no one has told you lately: Your wait is real. Your wait is heavy. Your wait is held.

When you wonder, Where is God in this? Advent reminds us that God is breaking through and God is already here. Jesus is on the way and Jesus has already arrived.

Somehow, in the mystery of time and eternity, the Light of the world is both on the horizon and in the room.

There is so much I don’t know. That I’ll never know.

But I cling stubbornly to this hope: God is with us in the wait. God is with us in every single breath.

A Note on Breath

As I’ve been researching for my new book of prayers, practices, and breath prayers, I’ve learned just how much our breath shapes our nervous system. How slow, intentional breathing whispers to our bodies, You’re safe. You’re held. You’re not alone.

This week, as we wait for Christmas (and for whatever else weighs heavily in our lives), we’ll practice breath prayers together.

God has formed us in such a way that breath helps reset our bodies and prayer helps anchor our souls.

What an exhale.

December Reading Guide

On this easily printable free PDF, you’ll find weekly Scriptures, breath prayers, and gentle reflections—plus notes on where to turn in Every Season Sacred and To Light Their Way if you want to go a little deeper.

It’s meant to meet you wherever you are in this Advent season. Take what serves you and leave the rest.

Reading Plan for December

216KB ∙ PDF file

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Download this free one-page PDF for where to turn for weekly readings and prayers for this Advent season.

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ICYMI

• Advent 2025 Week 1: Mary’s Yes & Your Belovedness

You aren’t Alone…

If this week’s reflection met you in your own waiting, I’d love to journey with you a little further.

Paid subscribers not only keep this newsletter going, but receive access to the whole Advent Week 2 companion bundle—including a curated playlist to keep you company in the long stretches, extended reflection prompts, a simple Advent practice, and past Advent essays and breath prayers waiting for you in the archive.

We’ve opened a special Advent sale right now: 30% off for a full year, and you’re welcome to cancel anytime (being here just for Advent is more than okay).

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And as always, if you need a scholarship, please let me know—I’m glad to offer one. My hope is that this space will be a companion for you as you wait, a reminder that you are not alone in the overwhelm.

Breath Prayer

Monday (For stepping into a new week)

INHALE: God of steadfast love,

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