Years ago, our church held a Wednesday night dinner. Our financial secretary arrived that evening and noticed a car pulling into the parking lot — a young couple with three children, all under the age of three. She could tell something was wrong. The man was in the back seat mixing a bottle for the baby. When someone invited them inside, it became clear just how desperate their situation was. The children had no clothes. The woman had no shoes.

What happened next has stayed with me.

Several people from that congregation quietly rose to the occasion. Someone listened to their story. Others put together dinners in to-go boxes. Someone gathered canned goods. Another person made a phone call and found them shelter and clothing for the night.

I have thought many times about the particular grace of that evening. Had it been any other night, no one would have been there. But it was Wednesday. And the people were there. And somehow, a family in crisis pulled into exactly the right parking lot at exactly the right moment.

A songwriter named Chuck Brodski wrote a song called "We Are Each Other's Angels." I like the title. Because it points to something true about the way grace tends to move in this world — not usually in dramatic, unmistakable ways, but through ordinary people who happen to be in the right place, who happen to notice, who happen to be willing.

You never know when God might use you to minister to someone in need. And you never know when someone will be there to minister to you.

Prayer: Make us attentive, O God, to the needs in the world around us, to the moments that call for more than indifference. However it might look, use us as angels for one another. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Psalm 115 belongs to a cycle of psalms that Jewish families have sung at Passover for thousands of years. Which means that on the night of the Last Supper — the night before his crucifixion — Jesus and his disciples would have sung this psalm together.

I find that image almost unbearable in the best possible way.

Jesus knew what was coming. And yet there he was, around the table with his closest friends, singing words he had known since childhood:

O Israel, trust in the Lord. O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord. All you who fear — trust in the Lord.

Trust. Trust. Trust.

The cross was not taken away. The suffering was not avoided. Whatever comfort those words offered, it was not the comfort of an easy road ahead.

And yet he sang the psalms anyway. Which tells me something about what trust actually is. Not the absence of fear. Not the guarantee of a good outcome. Not certainty about what comes next. Just the quiet, stubborn choice to hold on — to keep singing the ancient words even when the night is very dark and morning feels very far away.

Whatever you are facing today — the psalm that Jesus sang the night before the worst day of his life is still being sung. You are not the first person to need those words. And you will not be the last.

Trust in the Lord. Trust. Trust.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, you sang words of trust on the night before the cross. Teach us that same faith — not the faith that demands easy answers, but the faith that keeps singing even in the dark. We trust you. Even now. Amen.

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Dick Howser was a beloved manager of the Kansas City Royals in the 1980s. When he resigned due to brain cancer, his wife Nancy reflected on what the experience had taught her.

She said: "As a child I was brought up to believe that it is not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game. Then in the real world, I learned you had to win to get anywhere and it didn't matter how you did it. But now, after what has happened to Dick, I realize the old way is the right way. It really and truly is how you play the game."

Three stages. The childhood wisdom. The compromise the world demands. And then — in the wilderness — the return to what was true all along.

It is striking how often it takes a crisis to clarify what actually matters. The diagnosis. The loss. The moment when the things we have been chasing suddenly look very small. The wilderness has a way of burning off everything that isn't essential and leaving us face to face with what is.

But sometimes the wilderness does something more than clarify. Sometimes it opens us in ways we never could have been opened otherwise. Not just reminding us of what we already knew — but forming something genuinely new in us. A compassion we didn't have before. A humility we couldn't have chosen. A faith that was never truly tested until now and turns out, surprisingly, to hold.

Over the past several days, we reflected on a beautiful passage from the book of Isaiah.  God spoke to people living in exile: "I am about to do a new thing." (Isaiah 43:19) Not a restoration of what was. Something new. Something that could only have come through the wilderness, not around it.

The exiles didn't just return to Jerusalem with their old values clarified. They came back changed — deepened by what they had been through in ways that would shape their faith for generations. 

Nancy Howser rediscovered something she had always known. But many of us have stories of learning something in the wilderness we could never have learned any other way.

We have one shot at this life. And the wilderness — as unwelcome as it is — has a way of making that unmistakably clear. But we don't have to wait for the crisis to ask the question the crisis eventually forces. We can ask it today.

How are you playing the game?

Prayer: Gracious god, we confess that we sometimes lose sight of what matters most — chasing the wrong things, measuring ourselves by the wrong standards. And we thank you that even the hard seasons are not wasted in your hands. Use the wilderness to clarify, to deepen, to form in us what could not have come any other way. Help us to live now the way we would want to have lived when we look back. We ask all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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There is a certain kind of despair, I have noticed, that sets in when people begin to believe their best days are behind them. When every sentence starts with back when — back when the children were young, back when we were together, back when things were simpler.

And I understand it. Things don't stay the same. Children grow up and need us differently. Friends move away or go on ahead of us. We change. And even when we want to go back, we can't. That is simply not how life works.

But there is a cost to living back there. When we are clinging too tightly to what was — whether we are grieving it or romanticizing it — we are not fully present here. And here is all we actually have.

Over the past few days, we reflected on God's word through the prophet Isaiah to a people who had every reason to live in the past — either mourning the glory days before the exile or consumed by the trauma of what had happened to them. And God said something surprising: "Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing — do you not perceive it?"(Isaiah 43:18-19)

Do not miss the new thing because you are too focused on the old thing. The past — whether it was wonderful or terrible — does not get to own your future.

I have sat with people over the years who were so locked in the past — either aching for what was lost or unable to forgive what happened — that they had become almost unreachable by anything new. The grief was real. The loss was real. But somewhere along the way the past had stopped being something they carried and had become something that carried them.

And I have sat with others — some of them carrying losses just as heavy — who somehow remained open. Who grieved fully and still managed to stay curious about what came next. Who held the past with open hands rather than clenched fists. And in almost every case, something new did come. Not a replacement for what was lost. Something genuinely new.

I wonder what God might be wanting to do new in your life right now. And in mine. 

Prayer: Gracious God, loosen our grip on what was — the golden memories and the old wounds alike. Make us present to this moment, this day, this life we are actually living. We don't want to miss the new thing you are doing. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Dag Hammarskjöld served as Secretary-General of the United Nations during one of the most turbulent periods of the twentieth century. Few people knew that behind the public figure was a man who had passed through three years of intense inner darkness — a season of anguish and turmoil that he described as almost unbearable.

And yet something shifted. In his journal he wrote about a moment of quiet surrender — a point at which he said yes to God, without fully understanding what he was saying yes to. He described it simply: "At some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal."

As light began to break through, he wrote two lines that have stayed with me ever since:

"For all that has been — Thanks. For all that shall be — Yes."

Gratitude for the past. Openness to the future. Even the dark years. Even the wilderness.

Yesterday we reflected on the prophet Isaiah in God's words to a people in exile: "Do not remember the former things. I am about to do a new thing." Not a denial of the hard years — but a refusal to be imprisoned by them. The wilderness was real. And God was making a way through it.

Hammarskjöld understood something that is hard to learn: the dark seasons are often where trust and faith are most deeply formed.

For all that has been — thanks. For all that shall be — yes.

Prayer: Give us the courage, O God, of those who have said yes in the darkness — who have looked back on hard seasons with gratitude rather than bitterness. For all that has been, thank you. For all that shall be, yes. Amen.

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