Encourage-[en-kur-ij] to inspire with courage, spirit, or confidence.
The enCourage Blog is weekly dose of encouragement in a world that is often filled with bad news. We offer life-giving entries each Monday and Thursday written by gifted women from across our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). You can subscribe below to have them delivered to your inbox. With hundreds of blog pieces, you can search on a variety of topics in the search bar above to read and share with friends. Christina Fox, a gifted author, serves as our enCourage General Editor. If you are interested in submitting a piece, you can contact her at cfox@pcanet.org.
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How Do We Pray When Prayer is Hard
ELIZABETH TURNAGE | CONTRIBUTOR “Father, please send your angels to protect my mom.” I spoke this prayer on night ten of my mom’s fierce battle with Covid. Five hours later, she was dead. Have you ever received a resounding “no” to heartfelt prayers? Have you prayed prayers for days, months, and years and seen no evidence of change at all? Prayers for the return of a wayward child, prayers for freedom from deeply rooted sin patterns, prayers for relief from chronic pain? Perhaps with David, you have cried day and night but heard no answer and found no rest (See Psalm 22:2). In such seasons, bitterness or cynicism threatens to mute our tongues. How do we pray when prayer is hard? Three Crucial Practices Three crucial practices help us to pray when prayer is hard: learning the language of lament, which deepens faith; leaning into community, which grows hope; and listening for God’s declaration of his unfailing love, which expands love for God and for others. Learning the Language of Lament When prayer is hard, learning the language of lament can help us to emerge with a stronger faith. As Pastor Mark Vroegop explains, “Lament is a prayer in pain that leads to trust.”[i] Lament not only expresses our faith in the goodness of God, it also strengthens our faith in its expression. Prayers of lament often process through four categories: turning to God, naming the grief, asking persistently and boldly for help, and expressing restored confidence. Lamentations, Jeremiah’s lament over the fall of Jerusalem, illustrates each of these categories. Rather than turning away from God when relief from suffering doesn’t come, lamenters turn toward God. Jeremiah addresses his complaints to God in raw words few of us would dare to utter aloud: “You have wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through” (Lam. 3:44 ESV). Lamenters name their grief, refusing to minimize their suffering: “I am the one who has seen the affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven me and brought me into darkness without any light” (Lam. 3:1). Arguing that their current experience doesn’t seem to match their understanding of God’s goodness and mercy, lamenters ask persistently and boldly for help. Jeremiah keeps crying for help, “Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace!” (Lam. 5:1). In doing so, he expresses his firm conviction that “no one is abandoned by the Lord forever” (Lam. 3:31). Not always, but often, lamenters turn from complaint, expressing restored confidence that the Lord will redeem and restore again. Jeremiah’s turn comes in the familiar assurance: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:21-22). As Vroegop asserts, lament “stands in the gap between pain and promise.”[ii] Learning to lament helps when prayer is hard...
Look Up in Faith
JESSICA ROAN | GUEST It was another early morning. The 5:20 alarm went off as it always does, waking me for another day of teaching. On my way to school, I drove with my eyes fixed on the road, praying I would be ready to meet my twenty-six early morning students in just a few minutes. And then I saw it, a pinkish orange hue highlighting a sky full of cotton puffs. I couldn’t believe it. How many years had I been making this drive and I just now noticed? If I’m honest, I’ve always had a hard time looking up. On a particularly chaotic day at the treatment center I once worked at, I remember asking our sage psychologist: “What do we do? It’s crazy out there.” His answer? “That’s why the psalmist says, ‘I lift mine eyes to the hills’ (Psalm 121). We are supposed to look up, not at the world around us.” The students we worked with were displaying such severe behaviors, but God needed me to keep my eyes on him, not the events around me. There are many times when this brief conversation has come to mind, and often when it's much too late: I’ve already stressed, and even despaired at the circumstances around me. As Christians, we are called to keep our gaze on Christ. To look up for hope and help. To look away from ourselves, and to the One who controls all things We Look Up When We Lack Faith Noah was well-respected and righteous. One fateful day, God gave him a seemingly unreasonable command. He was to build an ark that was about 31,000 square feet (Gen. 6:17). God said he would flood the earth because the world was filled with evil. While many scholars believe it was 120 years from the command to build the ark until the flood, others believe it took merely 75 years. In any case, for Noah to work so diligently on a project for so long without understanding the significance of why he was doing so, could not have been easy. For decades, he risked his good standing in his community. His actions must have appeared strange to those around him. Interestingly, Noah has no dialogue in the Genesis account. This passage simply says, “Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him” (Gen. 6:22). While we don’t know what Noah said to God, we do know what he did. He trusted and obeyed God: “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb. 11:7) He “looked up” and waited for something to happen just because God said it would. This is a testimony to us in our own seasons of waiting for God to move in our lives. We continue to “look up” to God, trusting in his promises, even when they seem slow to come to fruition....
The High Calling of Finding Our Identity
.TARA GIBBS | CONTRIBUTOR Who am I? What defines me, motivates me, and practically shapes the thousands of small and big choices I make each day? Identity is the word for who we are and how we derive meaning. Every person either consciously or subconsciously answers the question: “What makes me “me”? When we introduce ourselves, we might tell someone what we do for work or fun. Although we might not realize it, a deeper look at daily choices might reveal unexamined ways we pursue identity—staying fit and toned, wearing hip clothes, accumulating Instagram likes, being affirmed for kind things we do, etc. Sometimes we even seek to build identity through a performance-based Christian life. A sad story is told of a young woman who became involved with a church while in college. She came to recognize herself as a sinner in need of forgiveness and soon became a leader in the ministry. She wanted to pursue missions, but first she did some graduate work in psychology. The more she studied, the more suspicious she became of what her Christian ministry taught her about her identity as a “worthless sinner.” Through her studies in psychology, this young woman began to again see herself as a person of value. The more she studied, the freer and less burdened she felt. She began to feel less guilty and more “healthy.” Her family rejoiced to see the return of their “happy” daughter. Yet this “freedom” and “health” were at the cost of her Christian convictions because this young woman had a fundamental misunderstanding regarding a Biblical view of Christian identity.[1] God’s Word tells us true identity will not be found in jobs, possessions, the pursuit of happiness, or even trying to be “good enough for God,” but rather as we gain a deep, heart knowledge of God’s goodness TO us...
Daughters of the King
LAURA TUCKER |GUEST “This must be your twin!” I hear this often when I am with my mother. She is my mother— not my sister—and she is in her 70s and I am in my 40s. In some ways, this comment makes me wonder, “How old do I look,” but it is a compliment…she has great skin, hair, and style! She has passed down genetic traits and characteristics, so, as her daughter, I do in fact resemble her likeness. But more than genetics, years of time spent with her has formed my facial expressions, mannerisms, and word choices in such a way that more and more I often hear, “You look just like your mother,” or “I know whose daughter you are!” Created as Image Bearers As much as I bear the image and likeness of my mother, there is One, the Lord our God and the Creator of all things whose image and likeness we all bear. Genesis 1:26-27 tells us that from the very beginning, the pinnacle of creation is in fact us, people, male and female made in the image and likeness of our Triune God. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Out of all God’s creation, it was mankind he declared was very good indeed (Gen. 1:31). God made us and gave us a purpose to fill the earth and subdue it, to have dominion over all creation. In the very beginning, we see the beautiful, purposeful design with which God created us to bear His image— His likeness in His kingdom. Fearfully and wonderfully made, each of us are knit together and formed, after the likeness of our Creator God. We were made to be fully known by Him, and in turn for us to know, love, and enjoy Him. More, we were made to be known as belonging to Him and to be recognized as His people in His kingdom...
