When God is transforming you, the old version of yourself stops fitting. In this episode, discover why the disorientation of spiritual growth is normal, and why Romans 12:2 frames transformation as a process worth trusting.

Shannon Jacobs had spent most of her life chasing the feeling that she had finally made it. She poured herself into academics and social standing, always wanting to be recognized. And no matter what she accomplished, there was an emptiness underneath all of it that she couldn't outrun.

In her second year of college, she trusted Christ. And she had no idea how much was about to change.

The change wasn't dramatic. It was gradual. Her priorities reordered. She started seeing people as people, where before she had seen them as competition. The drive to be recognized started to loosen its grip. Her closest friends noticed before she could put it into words.

She later wrote that one of the most unexpected things about following Christ was realizing the self she'd spent years building had to give way to something she hadn't chosen for herself. That was disorienting. It was also, she said, the most freeing thing she'd ever experienced.

Most of us who've been following Christ for a while have felt some version of this. You're not who you used to be, and the life you've been living doesn't quite fit anymore. Old habits are losing their grip. Some relationships feel strained in ways you can't fully explain. The version of you that's emerging doesn't match the version everyone around you has known.

That in-between place is uncomfortable. And it's also exactly where God is working.

Romans 12:2 calls this the renewing of your mind. Paul frames it as an ongoing process: let God transform you, present tense, something still happening. The Greek word he uses is metamorphoo, where we get metamorphosis. That's not a quick event. It's a complete restructuring from the inside out, and it takes time.

This episode takes an close look at what that process actually feels like, why the disorientation is a sign the work is underway, and what it means to be patient with a transformation that God Himself is doing.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why the discomfort of spiritual growth is normal and what it signals about what God is doing in you
• What Romans 12:2 reveals about the ongoing, gradual nature of transformation and why it doesn't feel clean while it's happening
• One practical way to name what God is changing in you and cooperate with the process

The disorientation of becoming someone new isn't something going wrong. It's God doing exactly what He promised.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/219

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Rate and Review

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

The desire for a life partner is one of the most tender longings a person can carry. In this episode, discover what God is actually doing in the waiting, and why Psalm 84:11 is a promise worth standing on.

Irene became a Christian in college and knew from the start what she wanted in a husband: a man with a solid faith. Pastor-level, she called it. She was still single at 27, watching friends marry one by one. Still single at 30, when the panic set in. She told God she was willing to meet Him halfway. Even a child, she said, she could do without. Just a husband. Please.

He didn't answer. Not the way she was expecting.

So she kept going. She threw herself into church ministry, served wherever she could, and kept bringing her desire for a husband back to God, year after year. For 20 years.

At 39, she married a man named Mike. A man she had already met. In high school.

Looking back, she wrote that she had gone into the waiting focused on finding the right person. She came out of it understanding what it meant to actually know God. She had shed a pride she hadn't known was there. When Mike finally showed up, she almost pushed him away because he didn't fit the checklist she had built. It took God changing her heart before she could see the man in front of her clearly.

This episode takes that longing seriously. No hollow platitudes. No "it'll happen when you stop looking." Just an honest look at what Scripture says about desire, timing, and what God is doing when He hasn't yet answered the prayer you've been praying the longest.

I've counseled singles who were carrying this longing with genuine grief. I've also sat across from people years later who married out of impatience and were living with the consequences. Both conversations broke my heart. Forcing God's timing does damage that takes years to undo. This episode is for the person who wants to wait well, and needs something more than a cliché to hold onto.

Psalm 84:11 is that something. The LORD will withhold no good thing from those who do what is right. If marriage is a good thing, and it is, then God is either preparing it for you, or preparing you for it, or both.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why the desire for a spouse is God-given, and what goes wrong when it quietly becomes a fixation
• What Psalm 84:11 actually promises, and how to stand on it without treating God like a vending machine
• What Irene's 20-year wait produced in her that made her ready for the marriage she almost missed

God is not withholding something good from you. Trust the timing to the One who sees the whole picture.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/218

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Rate and Review

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

Most of us worry about the sins we commit. Fewer of us stop to consider the good we never did. In this episode, discover why indifference is not neutral, and what Jesus said about the people who walked past someone bleeding on the road.

It was 4 degrees in Buffalo on Christmas Eve when Sha'Kyra Aughtry heard screaming outside her window. She looked out and saw a man stumbling in the snow. His name was Joey White. He was 64, developmentally disabled, and had wandered away from his group home in the middle of one of the worst blizzards in the city's history. His hands were encased in ice.

She brought him inside. She called 911. Nobody came. She called the National Guard. They put her on a list.

Sha'Kyra later said she had to talk herself into opening the door that night. She wasn't sure it was safe. She didn't know the man. But she opened it anyway. And because she did, he's alive.

That decision, the choice to stop rather than pull the curtain and go back to bed, is exactly what Jesus was describing in Luke 10 when he told the story of the Good Samaritan. A man is beaten and left half dead on the road. A priest comes along, sees him, and crosses to the other side. A Temple assistant does the same. Then a Samaritan, someone the original audience would have written off entirely, stops, kneels down, and does what it takes to get the man to safety.

Jesus didn't hold up the priest and the Temple assistant as villains. They weren't cruel men. They were busy men with reasons to keep moving. And he held them accountable anyway.

That's the part most of us don't sit with long enough. Indifference is not neutral. Seeing a need and walking past it is a choice, and James 4:17 names that choice plainly: it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.

This episode takes an close look at the sin of omission, the good we never did, the person we never reached, the moment we let pass because it wasn't convenient. It's a more uncomfortable category of sin than most, because it doesn't feel like anything. It just feels like a normal day.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why Jesus treated the inaction of the priest and Temple assistant as a moral failure, not a neutral non-event
• What James 4:17 says about the sin of knowing what you should do and choosing not to do it
• One concrete step you can take this week to stop walking past the person you've been meaning to reach

Indifference is a choice. And so is stopping.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/217

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

There are moments when following God means losing something you love. In this episode, discover what it looks like when obedience stops being a concept and becomes a cost, and why God has never failed anyone who said yes.

Obedience sounds inspiring on Sunday morning. It sounds clean and simple when it's someone else's story. But there are moments when following God means losing something you love, saying no to something you want, or walking away from something that has been the center of your life. That is where faith stops being a concept and becomes a cost.

In this episode, we follow the story of Ramata, a 17-year-old girl in the Ivory Coast who came to faith in Christ after a miraculous healing. Her family was Muslim. Her community was Muslim. When word got out that she had trusted Jesus, her family locked her in the house, took her food and water, and gave her four days to renounce her faith.

She wouldn't.

What happened next cost her everything she had built her life around, and opened a door she never could have found any other way.

Her story runs parallel to one of the most overlooked lines in all of Scripture. Genesis 12:4 says simply: "So Abram departed as the LORD had instructed." Four words that contain one of the most remarkable acts of faith in human history. Abraham was 75 years old. He had deep roots, a known identity, and a life that made sense. God told him to leave all of it for a destination He did not name. No map. No explanation. Just go. And Abraham went.

That is still the shape of costly obedience. Not a dramatic moment of courage, but a quiet decision to trust God's character more than your ability to see where you're going. And most of us, if we're telling the truth, stall out right there. We'll follow God as long as the cost stays manageable. When it requires a real loss, that's when the negotiating starts.

This episode also includes something personal. I was ten years old when my family first heard that salvation was a free gift because of what Jesus did on the cross. That night changed everything. And it cost us. My grandparents decided we had betrayed them and their religion. The relationship went cold for years. I watched my mom carry that. The obedience came first. The restoration came later, on a timeline none of us controlled.

Through Ramata's story, Abraham's departure, and that personal piece of my own family's history, this episode makes the case that God does not ask for sacrifice carelessly. He sees what He's asking you to leave. And He has never called anyone forward and then abandoned them in the going.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why costly obedience requires trusting God's character more than your ability to see the destination
• What Genesis 12:1-4 reveals about the kind of faith that moves before it has the full picture
• The difference between the yes that costs nothing and the yes that changes everything

The elder's curse didn't hold. God's call did. And it never has failed anyone who said yes.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/216

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

Looking back, most of us can point to a prayer God said no to that we are now grateful He didn't answer. In this episode, discover why God's refusals are not rejections, and how His no is often the most loving thing He does for us.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Genelle Guzman-McMillan went to work in her office on the 64th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. When the building collapsed, she was pinned in the rubble on the 13th floor, alone in the dark, unable to move, with no way of knowing that every coworker she had been descending with was gone.

Genelle had not been a woman of faith before that morning. But in the darkness, she began to pray. And then a hand reached through the rubble and took hers. A man's voice told her his name was Paul. He told her to hold on. He told her she was going to make it.

She was pulled out twenty-seven hours after the towers fell, the last living person removed from the rubble of the World Trade Center. When she asked about the man named Paul, nobody could find him. Nobody had seen him. Nobody knew who he was.

Genelle did not get what she would have prayed for that morning. She would have prayed to never be there. She would have prayed for the building not to fall. None of those prayers were answered the way she wanted. But what she found in the rubble, that hand, that presence, that encounter with a God she had not been looking for, became the turning point of her life.

Her story is one of the most striking illustrations of what this episode is really about: that God's refusals are not rejections. They are often the most strategic, most loving, most carefully considered responses He gives us.

The Apostle Paul experienced this firsthand. In 2 Corinthians 12, he describes a painful, persistent thorn in his flesh that he begged God three times to remove. God said no. Not because He didn't hear, but because what the thorn was producing in Paul was worth more than the relief Paul was asking for. God's answer was direct: my grace is enough, and my power works best in weakness.

Through Genelle's story and Paul's thorn, this episode takes an honest look at the prayers God chose not to answer the way we wanted, and what His refusals can produce in us that His yes never could.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why God's no is often the most loving and purposeful response He can give, and what it is designed to produce
• What 2 Corinthians 12:7-9 reveals about the relationship between unanswered prayer, weakness, and God's power
• A practical challenge to help you look back at one prayer God refused, and find His hand in the refusal

God is not careless with your prayers. He sees the full picture when you can only see the corner you're standing in. And sometimes the most loving thing a Father can do is refuse to give His child what the child is convinced they cannot live without.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/215

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

Do you feel the quiet pressure to blend in, stay silent, or water down your convictions when belief isn't welcome? In this episode, discover why God has never been impressed by majority opinion, and what it looks like to stand alone.

Maybe it's your workplace, where faith is treated as a quirk. Maybe it's your family dinner table, where your beliefs are the subject of gentle mockery. Maybe it's a college campus, a friend group, or a professional setting where Christianity is quietly considered out of place.

The pressure in those environments is rarely loud. It's the gradual accumulation of small moments where blending in would be easier than standing firm. And over time, that quiet pressure can wear something down in you if you're not paying attention to it.

In this episode, we follow the story of Joe Kennedy, a retired Marine who became a high school football coach in Bremerton, Washington. Before his very first game, he made a private promise to God: after every game, win or lose, he would walk to midfield, take a knee, and offer a brief prayer of thanks. Just fifteen seconds. Just him and God.

For seven years, nobody said a word. Then one day in 2015, a visiting administrator noticed. The school district told him to stop. They offered a compromise: he could pray, but only in secret, somewhere no one could see him. Coach Kennedy said no. And the district fired him for kneeling alone on a football field for fifteen seconds.

His story is a modern echo of Daniel 3, where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood before the most powerful ruler on earth and refused to bow to a gold statue while everyone around them already had. Their answer included one of the most remarkable phrases in all of Scripture: "But even if he doesn't." Their obedience was not conditional on a favorable outcome. They were not making a calculated bet. They were simply refusing to bow, regardless of the cost.

That kind of conviction is only possible when your identity is more anchored in who God is than in what the people around you think of you.

Through Coach Kennedy's story and the bold stand of Daniel 3:16-18, this episode draws an honest line between choosing your moments wisely and slowly editing your faith out of every conversation where it might cause friction.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why the quiet pressure to blend in is more spiritually dangerous than open opposition
• What the "even if he doesn't" faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego looks like in everyday modern life
• The difference between discernment and slow compromise, and how to tell which one you've been practicing

God has never been impressed by majority opinion. Some of His greatest work happens through one person willing to stand alone.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/214

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

What do you do when the person who hurt you never apologizes, never acknowledges the harm, or has already passed away? In this episode, discover why forgiveness is not for them. It is for you.

Most teaching on forgiveness has a built-in assumption: eventually, the other person comes around. They realize what they did. They say the words you've been waiting to hear. And that's when the healing begins.

But what happens when they never come? What happens when the person who hurt you feels no remorse, offers no acknowledgment, and may never even know the damage they caused? What if they've already passed away, and the apology you needed died with them?

Forgiveness without an apology feels unjust. It feels like letting someone off the hook they deserve to stay on. And so a lot of people don't do it. They hold on, they wait, and they rehearse the wrong, and they keep the wound fresh. And while they do, something is quietly happening inside them.

Stanford researchers wanted to know exactly what. So they studied it. What they found was not strength or self-protection. Every time a person revisited an old wound, their body responded as if the injury was happening all over again. Stress hormones spiked. Blood pressure climbed. The immune system took a hit. And in people who had been rehearsing their grievance for years, the damage had been accumulating the entire time.

Dr. Fred Luskin, founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, spent over thirty years studying unforgiveness and its effects. His conclusion was consistent: forgiveness has nothing to do with the other person. It does not require their participation, their awareness, or their apology. The key that unlocks the door is already in your hand.

That lines up precisely with what Jesus says in Matthew 18:21-22. When Peter asked how many times he should forgive someone who sinned against him, Jesus answered with a number so far beyond counting that the point is unmistakable. Forgiveness is not a limited resource dispensed to people who have earned it. It is a posture. A continual release of debts that others owe you, whether or not they ever acknowledge owing them.

Through the Stanford research and the direct teaching of Matthew 18, this episode draws a clear line between forgiveness and reconciliation, explains why bitterness costs far more than most people realize, and makes the case that releasing the debt is not injustice. It is freedom.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• The critical difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, and why only one of them requires the other person
• What Stanford researchers found happens inside the body and mind of someone who refuses to forgive
• Why bitterness is a prison where the wrong person ends up locked inside, and how to find your way out

The apology you have been waiting for is not the key that unlocks the door. You already hold that key.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/213

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Download Forgiveness: A Step-by-Step Plan for Freedom Guide

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/forgive

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

Spiritual pride doesn't look like arrogance. It looks like conviction. In this episode, discover how theological knowledge can quietly make you superior rather than compassionate, and what God says about it.

He had written more than fifty books on Christian theology. Billy Graham called him one of the greatest spokesmen for evangelicalism the world had ever produced. Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people on the planet.

And one morning in Argentina, after a long night of travel through heavy rain, John Stott, the most celebrated evangelical theologian of the twentieth century, was found crouched on the floor of their shared quarters, quietly brushing the mud off of a colleague's shoes.

Not his own shoes. Someone else's.

That image is the whole episode in one picture. And it raises a question worth sitting with: is your knowledge of Scripture making you more compassionate toward other believers, or more impatient with them?

Spiritual pride is one of the most difficult sins to detect because it doesn't feel like pride from the inside. It feels like conviction. It sounds like discernment. But when theological knowledge starts producing quiet superiority rather than a deeper desire to serve, something has gone wrong. The most informed person in the room is not automatically the most Christlike one.

Paul addresses this directly in 1 Corinthians 8:1-3. Writing to believers in Corinth who were looking down on less mature Christians over a theological dispute, he draws a clear line: knowledge makes us feel important, but it is love that strengthens the church. The person God recognizes is not the one who knows the most. It is the one who loves.

James 4:6 goes further: God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Not mildly inconvenienced. Actively opposed. Spiritual pride is not just an unpleasant character trait. It is a posture that puts you in direct opposition to what God is doing in your life.

Through the story of John Stott and the pointed warning of 1 Corinthians 8, this episode takes an honest look at how spiritual pride develops, what it actually looks like in daily life, and how genuine knowledge of God is supposed to change us.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• How to recognize spiritual pride in yourself, including the subtle, everyday ways it tends to surface
• What 1 Corinthians 8:1-3 reveals about the difference between knowledge that builds up and knowledge that puffs up
• The one question that serves as a reliable test for whether your theology is producing Christlikeness or superiority

Knowledge and transformation are not the same thing. The goal of knowing Scripture is not to be recognized by others. It is to become more like the One you have been studying.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/212

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

Do you minimize your pain and carry things alone because you don't want to be a burden? In this episode, discover why that belief is not just unhelpful, it's wrong, and how letting others in is exactly what God designed.

She hadn't eaten a real meal in two days. She was sitting in her car in the church parking lot after the service, watching everyone else laugh and make lunch plans. And she thought: I cannot tell any of these people what is happening in my life right now.

Not because they were unkind. Not because they wouldn't care. But because somewhere along the way she had decided that her problems were too heavy to hand to someone else. That asking would be an inconvenience. That needing something from the people around her would be too much.

So she smiled, waved, and drove home alone to an empty refrigerator.

A lot of us live in that parking lot. We carry things quietly, minimize our pain in conversation, and only reach out when things have gotten so bad we have no other option. We tell ourselves it's strength. But most of the time, it's isolation with better posture.

In this episode, we look honestly at the belief that your needs are too much, where it comes from, why it persists, and why Scripture pushes back on it directly. Romans 15:1-2 describes the body of Christ as a community of mutual burden-bearing, where those with capacity in a given season carry for those who don't, and then the season turns. Galatians 6:2 goes further, calling this kind of burden-sharing obedience to the law of Christ. Which means that when you refuse to let anyone in, you are not being noble. You are making it harder for the people around you to do what God has called them to do.

We also look at a Stanford research study that tested exactly what happens when people ask for help. Help-seekers consistently predicted they would inconvenience or annoy the people they asked. They were wrong, consistently and significantly wrong. The people who were asked didn't feel burdened. They felt glad, useful, and genuinely satisfied to be able to show up for someone who needed them.

The story we tell ourselves, that we are too much, that our needs are an imposition, that asking will drive people away, is not just unhelpful. It is measurably, reliably wrong.

Your needs are not an imposition on the body of Christ. They are an invitation for it to be exactly what God designed it to be.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why carrying things alone is not strength, and what it is actually costing you and the people around you
• How Romans 15:1-2 and Galatians 6:2 reframe asking for help as participation in God's design, not weakness
• What Stanford researchers found when they studied the gap between what we fear will happen when we ask for help and what actually does

You were not designed to fall alone. And the people around you may be waiting for you to give them the chance to show up.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/211

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

Most believers don't walk away from God in one dramatic moment. They drift. In this episode, discover how the slow, silent drift happens, and how to find your way back one small step at a time.

Most people who have drifted from God can't tell you exactly when it happened. There was no single decision, no dramatic moment of walking away. Things just got busy. Life got loud. A skipped quiet time became a week, then a month. Church became occasional. Prayer shrank down to emergencies only. And one day, without any clear turning point to point to, God felt far away.

That is one of the most common experiences in the Christian life, and Hebrews 2:1 names it with a single, precise word: drift.

In this episode, we follow the story of Dan Ho, a 63-year-old man who swam at Cedar Beach on Long Island every single morning. He knew those waters. He was comfortable there. On an ordinary Tuesday in July 2023, he waded in and started his usual swim. He felt nothing unusual. No sudden pull. No moment of alarm. The water felt exactly like it always did.

Then he looked up. And the shore was gone.

A rip current had taken him, gradually and silently, without a single moment he could identify as the one where things went wrong. He was now alone in the open Atlantic Ocean, two and a half miles from where he had entered the water, with no idea how far out he actually was.

That image captures exactly what Hebrews 2:1 is warning us about. The drift that pulls a believer away from God rarely announces itself. It doesn't feel like rebellion. It feels like ordinary life moving at its ordinary pace. The danger is precisely that it feels like nothing at all, until the day you look up and the shore isn't where it used to be.

Through Dan's story and the sober warning of Hebrews 2:1, this episode takes an honest look at how the drift happens, what it costs, and what the return actually looks like. Because here is the good news: you come back the same way you left. One small step at a time. And God's posture toward the person who has drifted is not disappointment or distance. It is the posture of the father in Luke 15, scanning the horizon, already running toward you before you finish your rehearsed speech.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• How the slow, silent drift away from God happens, and why it is so difficult to detect while it's happening
• What Hebrews 2:1 reveals about the specific kind of danger that faces committed, believing Christians
• A simple, honest self-audit to help you identify where you actually are, and one practical step to start closing the distance

The drift is slow and silent. But so is the return. And God has been watching for you the whole time.

Share This Episode:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/210

Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail

Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.

https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/

Connect with Bart

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives

Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com

Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Our Private Facebook Community

If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group