Daily Devotions for Busy Lives

Years after a relationship ended, a lot of people still feel the pull to look. You scroll the profile at midnight. You ask a mutual friend how they're doing, like it's just curiosity. Each little check feels harmless. It isn't. Every time you go back to look, you pull the scab off a wound that was trying to heal, and you plant yourself again in a place God already led you out of.

This episode opens with Linnie, who spent 3 years trying to move on after a 7 year relationship ended. She threw herself into work and read her Bible, and still part of her wondered what would happen if she just reached out. So one day she sent him a message, hoping the door might still be open. He was already with someone else, and within a few months he married her. Linnie fell apart, standing in front of a closed door and knocking when God had already moved her down the hall.

Paul knew the pull to live in the past, and he made a decision about it. Philippians 3:13-14 says he focused on one thing: forgetting what was behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, pressing on toward the prize God was calling him to. When Paul says forgetting, he means he refused to keep living back there. His memory still worked; he just stopped treating his past as a place to visit whenever the present got painful, and he faced forward and ran.

That is the choice when you're tempted to check up on an ex. Going back feels like it will bring relief, a hit of connection or some sense of closure, but it never delivers. It just reopens the wound and leaves you standing in the past while your life waits up ahead. And here is a truth that helps: some of the doors in your life, God closed on purpose, and He closed them for you. That ended relationship may be an exit He walked you through. The relief you're aching for was never behind that door. You'll find it on the other side of putting the phone down and letting the past stay past.

That is what Linnie learned. She stopped knocking, turned around, and found God in the hallway. She let the man go, and in time she could even pray for his marriage. Freedom like that is waiting for you on the other side of stopping.

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

• Why "one more look" at an ex reopens a wound instead of bringing closure
• What Philippians 3:13-14 means by forgetting the past and pressing forward
• A practical way to guard your heart the next time you feel the pull to check up

Some doors God closes for your good. The relief you're looking for is on the far side of putting the phone down and letting the past stay past.

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Some wounds don't stay in the past. They move into your head and take up residence. You replay the conversation, or the thing they said that you can't unhear, and every time you run it, you feel it again, fresh, like it just happened. That's what makes it so exhausting. You're not being hurt once. You're being hurt on a loop, and it can go on for years before you notice what it's costing you.

This episode opens with Lysa TerKeurst, who led a growing ministry and loved her family, then found out her husband had been unfaithful. The affair hurt, but a second pain came after, and it lived entirely in her head. Long after the discovery, her mind kept playing the betrayal back to her, ambushing her while she folded laundry or drove, and she would feel it as if it were happening for the first time. Forgiving the man was one battle. Getting her mind to stop rehearsing what he had done was another.

There is a promise in Isaiah for a mind that won't settle down. Isaiah 26:3 says God keeps in perfect peace all whose thoughts are fixed on Him. Notice the word fixed. Older translations say stayed. To stay your mind on God is active work, keeping it brought back on purpose, again and again, the way you hold a boat straight against a current. You can't always stop a memory from arriving. But when the loop starts, you don't have to press play one more time. You can catch it, turn your attention to God, and do it again the next time, and the time after that.

The harm did happen, and you are not asked to deny it. What you are choosing is to stop reopening a wound you want healed. Some wounds only close when you finally stop picking at them. Handing the memory to God, over and over, is how you let Him do the healing you can't do by reliving it.

That is the work Lysa had to do. She came to see forgiveness as a daily choice, one she made again every time the replay started, catching it and handing it back to God instead of pressing play. Her marriage did not survive, and she says so plainly, but the loop did not get to run the rest of her life. She turned it off, one interruption at a time, and built something new on the other side.

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

• Why replaying a hurt keeps wounding you long after the event is over
• What Isaiah 26:3 means by a mind stayed on God, and why it takes active effort
• A practical way to catch the replay and turn it off, one interruption at a time

The harm did happen, but you don't have to keep pressing play. When the loop starts, turn your mind to God and let Him do the healing.

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A lot of Christians hit stretches where nothing is exactly wrong. The bills are paid. The family is functioning. You have plenty to be thankful for, and you are, and still you wake up with a dryness you can't explain. You're moving through good days without tasting them. There's no crisis to point to and no obvious hole to fill, which can be more confusing than an outright problem, because you can't even say what's the matter.

This episode opens with Ann Voskamp, who ran a family farm, was raising a houseful of kids, and loved God. By every outward measure she was fine. And still, most mornings, she woke up with a hollow feeling she couldn't explain, thankful on paper and empty inside, unable to fix it. Then a friend gave her a strange little dare.

God described this exact condition through Jeremiah. Jeremiah 2:13 says God's people did two evil things: they abandoned Him, the fountain of living water, and they dug for themselves cracked cisterns that could hold no water at all. A cistern is a hole you carve out to store water you've hauled in from somewhere else. These were cracked, so the water leaked out as fast as it went in. God's people traded a spring that flows on its own for a leaky tank they had to keep refilling.

That is how emptiness shows up in a comfortable life. You are still drinking, just not from the fountain. You pull little sips of life from your work and your screens, from the next thing that needs you. None of those are evil, but they cannot hold water. They give you a swallow and leave you thirsty again by morning, until you feel hollow in the middle of a life that looks full. The answer is to go back to the source. Working your cisterns will only wear you out, because they were never going to hold. Ordinary time with God, unhurried, with your Bible open and your phone away, is the thing that refills a soul, and there is no substitute for it.

That is what Ann discovered. Her friend dared her to write out 1,000 small gifts she'd been walking past, and as she paid attention, gift by gift, she noticed God right there in the dishwater and the noise. Nothing about her life changed. The dryness did. The fountain had been within reach the whole time, and she had simply stopped drinking from it.

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

- Why you can feel empty even when your life is stable and nothing is wrong

- What Jeremiah 2:13 reveals about the cracked cisterns we dig instead of drinking from God

- A simple way to get back to the fountain and let God refill your soul

When the soul runs dry in a life that looks full, the answer is to go back to the fountain: ordinary time with the God who never runs out.

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After enough letdowns, you decide it's safer to expect nothing. If you don't get your hopes up, they can't come crashing down. You watched a prayer go unanswered. You trusted someone and they let you down. So now you hold everything at a careful distance, bracing for the next disappointment before it comes. Hope starts to feel like a setup.

This episode opens with Kashia and Riley Palmer, who longed to be parents for years. After fertility treatments failed, they turned to adoption, and a call came about twin baby boys. They raised 45,000 dollars in two days and flew to meet their sons, only to have a nurse meet them at the hospital door. The birth mother had changed her mind, and they flew home with empty arms and a fear a lot of us know: the fear of ever letting yourself hope again.

Solomon named this ache 3,000 years ago. Proverbs 13:12 says, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life." Solomon is naming something true. When you want something and the waiting stretches on, it wears on you and can leave a bruise that lasts for years. God's Word doesn't pretend that away. But look at the second half of the verse. A dream fulfilled is a tree of life, the kind that grows and shelters. The problem was never hope itself. The problem is where we aim it.

When you pin all your hope on one outcome, one answer arriving by a certain date, you're betting your heart on something that might not come. God is asking you to hope in Him, not just in the thing you want from Him. Hoping in an outcome is fragile, because outcomes can fall through. Hoping in God is sure, because He doesn't. He may not give you the exact thing on your timeline, but He has promised never to leave you empty.

That is the hope the Palmers finally found. Months later another call came, this time a baby girl. Their hands were up, and they knew they could not guarantee the outcome. That part belonged to God. Scared and hoping anyway, they flew to meet their daughter, and the birth mother looked at them and said, "You're here. You're really here." They came home a family. They didn't hope less the second time. They hoped scared, with their hope resting where it couldn't be crushed.

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

• Why disappointment makes so many people quietly stop letting themselves hope
• What Proverbs 13:12 says about the toll of hope deferred and the life a fulfilled hope brings
• How to keep hoping by aiming your hope at God instead of a single outcome

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but hope aimed at God won't leave you empty. Keep hoping, and aim it at Him.

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We size people up in a second, then miss the story we can't see. Discover why Romans 14:4 says the person you're judging was never yours to judge, and how to catch yourself in the moment.

You're standing in a checkout line, or scrolling a feed, and you catch yourself passing judgment on someone you've never met. The way they're handling their kids. The opinion they posted. In a second flat, you've tried them and moved on, and half the time you don't notice you did it until it's already done. The verdict feels like insight in the moment. Most of the time it's just a guess dressed up as knowing.

This episode opens with Jason Wright, who stopped at the same convenience store every morning and decided he had the clerk figured out. Her name was Cheri. She rarely smiled and kept her answers short, and Jason wrote her off as unfriendly, a woman who probably hated her job. One morning he asked the manager why Cheri always seemed so down, and the manager stopped and looked at him.

Paul asked the Romans a question that stops you cold when it's aimed at you. Romans 14:4 says, "Who are you to condemn someone else's servants? Their own master will judge whether they stand or fall. And with the Lord's help, they will stand and receive his approval." Every person you're tempted to size up belongs to somebody, and that somebody is God. When you pass judgment on a stranger, you pick up a gavel that belongs to the Judge of all the earth, and He never handed it to you.

Notice how the verse ends. With the Lord's help, they will stand. Paul goes further than telling you to back off. He tells you what God is doing in the person you were writing off: working to help them stand. So while you were deciding they were a lost cause, their Master was on their side. There's mercy in that for you, too. You wouldn't want to be judged by a stranger's 10-second read of you on your worst morning, and neither would the person in front of you. Everybody you meet is dealing with something you can't see from where you're standing.

That is exactly what Jason found out. The manager told him Cheri had lost both of her parents that year, within a few months of each other, after a lifetime of caring for them. The grouch he'd invented in his head was a daughter buried in grief, and he'd been standing three feet from it every morning without knowing, because he'd already closed the case. That's what judgment does. It closes the case before you've heard any of the evidence.

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

• Why a snap verdict about a stranger is almost always missing the biggest part of the story
• What Romans 14:4 says about who has the right to judge another person
• A simple move for the moment you catch yourself judging someone

The people you're tempted to judge belong to God, not to you, and every one of them is dealing with something you can't see. Hand the gavel back.

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Some of the things that worry us most are the ones we have the least power over. You can't control what your adult child decides to do. You can't guarantee your health will hold up tomorrow. The economy, or what other people think of you, some of it you can nudge and a lot of it you simply can't touch. Part of why we grip these things is that worrying feels like doing something. If I'm anxious about it, at least I'm taking it seriously. But worry only wears the costume of responsibility. It changes nothing on the outside and drains you on the inside.

This episode opens with Lim Wan Phing, who graduated in 2008 as the global economy collapsed and spent 2 years finding her first job. Four years in, the company folded, and all 60 employees were out of work at once. What unsettled her most was that none of it had been in her hands. She hadn't made a bad call. The company simply came apart around her.

Jesus put a plain question to people who worry. Matthew 6:27 says, "Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?" The answer is obvious. Worrying has never added a minute to anyone's life or fixed one thing they feared. Someone once called worry unpaid rent on tomorrow: you pay today, in sleep and peace, for a day that may never come the way you dread. Jesus wasn't scolding people for caring. He was pointing them toward a better place to put what they couldn't fix, telling them again and again to hand it to their Father, who already knows what they need.

Here is a practice that helps. Sort your worry into two piles. One pile is what you can do something about, so go do it: take the step, make the call. The other pile is everything outside your reach, and that is the pile to hand to God. Peace usually comes on the far side of admitting a thing was never yours to fix.

That is how Wan Phing found her way through. She admitted the whole thing was out of her control and looked somewhere steadier than a paycheck, coming back to Psalm 121, where the writer lifts his eyes to the hills because his help comes from the Lord. She was God's child before the company folded, and God's child after. That was the one thing the collapse couldn't touch, and it is the ground worry can't take from you either.

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

• Why worry feels like responsibility while it changes nothing and wears you down
• What Matthew 6:27 says about the futility of worrying over what you can't control
• A simple way to sort your worries and hand the uncontrollable ones to God

Worry can't add a single moment to your life. Do the part that's yours, and hand the rest to a Father who can hold what you can't.

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Some Christians look back on a stretch of their lives and see wasted years. Time sunk into a relationship that damaged you. A career you chased that turned out to be the wrong one. A lot of the time there's no big sin to confess, just the grief of years you can't return and can't redo. That's its own kind of loss, and it deserves to be named. Bart has watched people, good people, add up years of their lives and call them a waste, and he's learned to take that grief seriously, because God does.

This episode opens with Addie Zierman, a teenager youth pastors pointed to, stacked WWJD bracelets up her arm and burning to do everything right for God. She and a boy named Chris set out to be the most on-fire Christians in the room. By her early 20s the fire had turned into exhaustion and anger. She married young and unprepared, and she started to come apart.

God speaks to that kind of loss from an unlikely place. Joel wrote to farmers who had lost everything to a plague of locusts, insects that came in waves and ate the crops and the seed, years of work gone. Joel 2:25 records God's promise: "I will give you back what you lost to the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts." Notice He doesn't pretend the loss away or tell them it wasn't so bad. He calls it what it was, a great destroying army, and then He promises to give the years back.

That is the difference between rewinding and redeeming. Rewinding would erase the years, and no one gets to do that. Redeeming takes those years, locusts and all, and puts them to work for good. You can't reach into the past and refill it. God can take the emptiest stretch of your life and grow something out of it that couldn't have grown any other way. The years weren't wasted after all. They were seed for a harvest you couldn't see yet.

That's what happened to Addie. Slowly she found her way back to Jesus and to the ordinary, imperfect people of the church. She traded a faith built on looking on fire for one she could live in, and the years she thought she'd thrown away became the work she's known for now, so other people can find their way back too. The wasted years got more than forgiven. They got repurposed.

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

• Why some regret is grief over lost time, with no moral failure attached
• What Joel 2:25 promises about the years the locusts ate
• The difference between rewinding your past and letting God redeem it

You can't rewind the years you lost. The God of Joel 2:25 can redeem them, and He is never handed a ruined thing He can't use.

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There comes a stretch of years when the mirror stops feeling like a friend. Your knees don't work the way they used to. The energy you took for granted at thirty isn't there when you reach for it. You catch a photo of yourself and don't recognize the person looking back, and something in you resents it. Bart knows the feeling. In his mind he still feels like he's in his thirties, until he bends down to tie his shoes, hears himself groan, and remembers his body didn't get the memo.

This episode opens with Sharon Betters and Susan Hunt, two longtime Bible teachers who were each asked to speak on growing older. The surprise was who leaned in to listen. Right alongside older women were women in their 20s and 30s, taking notes on how to age well before they had started. In a culture that spends billions trying to look young, these young women wanted to know how to grow old on purpose, so Sharon and Susan went looking for an answer in Scripture.

Paul gave the Corinthians the plain truth and a longer view at the same time. 2 Corinthians 4:16 says, "That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day." Paul does not soften the first part. Our bodies are dying. An older rendering says our outer self is wasting away. He is not going to insult you by telling you your knees are fine.

But look at the second half. While the body winds down, something else in you is being renewed, every single day. Your spirit, the person God is making, is not aging. It is growing. The renewal and the decline are happening on the same timeline, in the same person, and the part being built up is the part that lasts forever. The wrinkles and the stiff joints are telling you the truth about the outer person. They just cannot see the part of you that is getting newer while the rest gets older.

That is what Sharon and Susan found. They wrote "Aging with Grace," ending each chapter with a friend between 70 and 90 telling how she made peace with her changing body. Sharon, whose own body was giving out, put the heart of it in one sentence: "As my body weakens, my God-ordained purpose to glorify God is unchanged." The years take things from the body. They don't get a vote on what God is doing in you.

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

• Why resenting your aging body is a common struggle that few people admit
• What 2 Corinthians 4:16 says is being renewed in you even as the body wears down
• One thing you can do to feed the inner person on the days the mirror discourages you

Your body is wearing out, but the person God is making inside you is being renewed every day, and that is the person who lasts.

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The death of a loved one who never professed faith carries a grief few people know how to talk about. Discover why the secret things belong to God, and how that gives you room to grieve with hope.

Losing someone you love turns everything sideways under any circumstances. When the person who died never professed faith in Christ, there's an added layer of grief, and most people don't know how to talk about it. You replay old conversations. You wonder if there was one more thing you could have said. You want to know what happened between them and God at the end, in a moment you weren't in the room for, and you can't. That not-knowing can eat at you for years.

This episode opens with Trudy Harris, a hospice nurse who sat with hundreds of people in their final days. One patient was an older man who had spent his life with no use for God and made his opinion of faith clear. Trudy cared for him anyway, and near the end she felt she should tell him plainly that God loved him.

Moses gave grieving believers something to hold on to. Deuteronomy 29:29 says the LORD our God has secrets known to no one, but that we are accountable for what He has revealed. There are things God has shown us plainly, including how to be saved and how to come to Christ. And there are things He keeps to Himself. What passed between your loved one and God in their final hours is one of the secret things. You don't have the whole picture. Only God does.

That is grounds for hope rather than dread. The God who holds those secrets is more merciful than you can imagine, and more just than you can imagine, both at once. He is not looking for a reason to turn someone away. He knows what happened in that last hour, the thought your father never said aloud, the prayer your friend may have breathed when no one could hear. Who knows but that they understood the gospel and trusted Christ before they died. You can't see it. He can. You can trust Him with what you can't know, because He loved that person even more than you did.

That is the kind of hidden thing Trudy witnessed at the bedside, and it is a reminder that God is often at work in a person's final hours in ways their family never sees. This episode also turns the grief outward, toward the people still living who don't yet know Christ, and the chance you still have to tell them.

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

• Why the death of a loved one whose faith was uncertain carries a grief few people name
• What Deuteronomy 29:29 says about the secret things that belong to God alone
• How to hand the question you can't answer to God, and let your grief move you toward the living

The secret things belong to the Lord. You can grieve with hope and leave what you can't know in the hands of a God more merciful than you can imagine.

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There are stretches of the Christian life when you pray and it feels like nothing is happening. The words come out of your mouth and vanish into the room, with no sense that anyone is on the other end. You start to wonder if you're doing it wrong, or whether God is listening at all. That kind of stretch can make you want to quit praying, because talking to the ceiling starts to feel pointless.

This episode opens with Amy Carmichael, who spent 35 years rescuing children in southern India and was almost impossible to keep still. In 1931 she fell into an unlit pit, shattered her leg, and twisted her spine, and she spent the last 20 years of her life confined to bed in constant pain. She did what she had always done. She prayed, asking God for the one thing she wanted most, to be well enough to get back to her children and her work. And she waited for the answer.

The psalmist knew that place. Psalm 88:1-2 says, "O LORD, God of my salvation, I cry out to you by day. I come to you at night. Now hear my prayer; listen to my cry." What makes this psalm different from almost every other one is that it never turns the corner. Most psalms that start in the dark climb toward hope by the end. This one doesn't. The writer cries out day and night, and the last line leaves him in the dark with no answer in hand.

Now think about that. The people who assembled the Bible could have left this one out, a prayer with no resolution and no lesson tied up in a bow. They kept it. God kept it, so you would know that a prayer like yours, the kind that seems to go nowhere, belongs in Scripture right alongside the ones that got answered. Your unanswered prayer belongs in the faith. It's printed right in the middle of it.

Here is the truth Psalm 88 holds open for you. Some prayers don't get answered in the room where they're prayed. You may hear nothing back. And still, God heard every word you said. The silence in the room was never silence in heaven. Amy Carmichael learned it from a bed she never got up from, and out of those years came a line people still repeat: in acceptance lieth peace.

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

• Why a stretch of unanswered prayer is not a sign you're doing it wrong
• What Psalm 88 reveals by ending in the dark, with no resolution, on purpose
• How to keep bringing God the prayer that feels like it's going nowhere, and leave the answer with Him

God hears every prayer you pray, even the ones that seem to vanish. The silence in the room was never silence in heaven.

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