personal development from psalm 32

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

How To Apologize • express sorrow (I’m sorry) • own guilt (I was wrong) • name specific wrongs (I did X) • name impact (I hurt u) • no IFs (sorry if I) • don’t blameshift/defend (but u) ...

God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: We need to hear Your invitation and promise to come to us when we are weary and burdened, and you’ll give us rest ... rest for our souls. So we come. We come with our...

God of mercy, in your gracious presence we confess our sin and the sin of this world. Although Christ is among us as our peace, we are a people divided against ourselves as we cling to the values of a...

Leader: We are people of the resurrection. Witnesses to God’s glorious victory in Jesus Christ, which brings peace and transforms the power structures of this world. But we also know that we live in ...

Lord, you tell us in your word that when we know the good we ought to do and fail to do it, we are in sin. Can we truly know the extent of our need for your grace? Are we conscious of the multitude of...

Prayer of Adoration Father God … our Abba: You seek us with relentless love – coming after us in Your Son, Jesus. When we are in the pits – You draws us up and out; When we are broken – You fix u...

All: O Lord, you declare that the forgiven person is blessed, that the person who has no deceit is blessed. We confess that we have had deceitful hearts, deceitful tongues, deceitful thoughts, and dec...

Lord, may your glorious Majesty surround us, the blessed Trinity protect us, and the eternal Godhead preserves us. Your unlimited mercy support us; your loving kindness encompass us; your favor c...

It is human to err, it is devilish to remain willfully in error.

We know mistakes were made.

I see my past drinking as a behavioral problem, a learned response to dealing (or not dealing) with emotional pain and stress. Once I achieved the excavation of my wounds, I no longer lived with the s...

The strangest thing happens when what we have most wanted to conceal is brought into the open. We don’t die. Instead, we often begin to heal.

Walker Percy wrote six novels in which he made us insiders to the spiritual disease of alienation that he found pervasive in American culture. His name for the condition is “lost in the cosmos.” We do...

It doesn’t matter what the specific decision is. Unmade decisions hold power. They pull, they push, they interrupt where they aren’t wanted and poke us awake at night. They can turn us into strange ve...

We’re afraid when we’re suddenly caught off our guard and don’t know what to do. We’re afraid when our presuppositions and assumptions no longer account for what we’re up against, and we don’t know wh...

Jesus gives us hope because he keeps us company, has a vision, and knows the way we should go.