When I was a toddler, my mother taught me a little bedtime prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. I'm still not sure what it was about the thought of dying in the middle of the night that was supposed to make me want to go to sleep. 

I remember that Mom would then "soothe" me by singing a lullaby about a baby in a cradle wedged in a tree that came crashing down when the wind caused the load-bearing limb to break. Surely, if I was going to die in my sleep that would be how.

And parents wonder why we're in therapy.

Our bodies, minds, even our souls crave times of tranquility. For our own health and well-being--not to mention the well-being of those around us--we need regular periods of calm and quiet. But, for many in today's culture, rest and relaxation are foreign concepts. Times of caring for our bodies, de-cluttering our minds, and quieting our souls are often the first things scratched from our "To Do" lists when we get too busy.

We happen to have a Heavenly Father who wants nothing but the best for His kids. That's why it grieves Him when He sees us weighing ourselves down with unmet needs, unreasonable expectations, and unresolved issues. His desire is that we soar like eagles. But we are often so weighed down by the pressures, fears, and worries of this world that we can't get off the ground.

So our Heavenly Father comes alongside us. He offers to carry our burden for us. His invitation is given in the book of Matthew: "Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light" (Matt. 11:28, NLT).

When we are worn out from the despair of trying to be all things to all people, God says, come to me. When we are overwhelmed with doubts that we could ever be "successful," God says, come to me. When we are burdened with discouragement from seeking approval from others who will never give it, God says, come to me.

But there's more. When we come to our Heavenly Father through His Son, He invites us then to take from Him. Take my yoke upon you.

A yoke is a carved, wooden beam that connects oxen together to pull a heavy load or cart. Yokes make it possible for oxen to handle a burden they could never carry on their own. Yokes allow animals to share their strength so they can work beyond their capacity.

When we take Jesus’s yoke upon us, we are, in essence, taking on His power. The result is synergistic. By joining with Him, we operate beyond our capacity. He keeps pulling along with us until we get the job done. When we take His yoke on us and follow His lead, we find rest from our burdens.

Being yoked with Jesus also assures us that not only won’t He leave our side, He can’t leave our side! By definition, once we take on His yoke, He takes on ours.

Once we come to Him and take from Him, God, as explained in this text from Matthew, then makes us this offer: let me teach you. Our Heavenly Father wants us to enter into a relationship with Him so that we can see and experience for ourselves the serenity and peace that only He can give.

Nowhere in the Bible does our Heavenly Father say, come to me and I will take your problems away. Despite what many “health and wealth” preachers are promising, God never vows to give His children a problem-free life. His guarantee is quite the opposite. Jesus said, "Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows." That’s our promise. You won’t see Grandma cross-stitching that verse to hang on the living room wall. But there was more to Jesus's statement. There is a second part to this text, an addendum that provides a divine disclaimer, a comforting conclusion: "But take heart, because I have overcome the world" (John 16:33, NLT).

No matter what trials or sorrows we face on this earth, God’s kids can take heart. We are yoked to One so powerful that He rose victorious over sin and death and hell. Surely He can handle any problems we may face.  

When we find ourselves unable to sleep at night we would be wise to follow our Heavenly Father's advice. Come to Him. Take His yoke. Learn from Him. In His arms we will find rest for our souls.  


 

A spiritual life that's based only on going to church, reciting rote prayers, and donating to good causes is like a marriage that consists solely of spending an hour and a half a week with your spouse, making obligatory phone calls, and seeing to it that your bills are paid. Without relationship, there's nothing there. 

(illustration by Zachary Lubarski)

“We serve an all-powerful, amazing, strong God. But we don’t focus enough on that aspect of him. Consequently, our churches are filled with people who are scared and weak. It doesn’t look right for such a powerful God to have such weak children. Powerful is not an adjective I would use to describe most of the people filling churches today. We should talk about the strength of God. God is strong.”

While I wholeheartedly agree with that statement from author Francis Chan First, I also recognize that many who have hoped that God's power and strength would save them from difficult, often dangerous situations have been left disappointed. 

The reality is, while God is powerful enough to make the mountains tremble, He never promises to protect His children from all that makes us tremble. We will struggle with pain in heartache in life. That has been the case for every human being since sin entered the world. Storylines that include imprisonment, illness, depression, drunkenness, infertility, marital unfaithfulness, and fatherlessness are not reserved for Days of Our Lives. The most beloved biblical characters had skeletons such as these in their prayer closets. 

God does not always shield us from evil. But our Heavenly Father always protects our identity as children made in His image. Our Heavenly Father always provides avenues for us to appropriate our true value and worth. Our Heavenly Father always protects us with His ever present strength in every situation. That strength may not prevent bad things from happening to us, but it does prevent us from being defined by those things.

Problems in life provide God an opportunity to prove how much we need Him. It is in our deepest struggles that our relationship with Him is deepens. It is in going through adversity that our understanding of Him is developed. It is when our hearts hurt the most that they connect with His heart the best.

Safety is not found in the absence of danger; it is found in the presence of God. In other words, we are always safe in Him.  

Our Heavenly Father is by our side and, at this very moment, is offering to give us the security, the strength, the power, the peace that we crave. He wants nothing more than to turn our heartache into hope, our frustration into fearlessness, our insecurity into invincibility. In fact, only He has the power to accomplish that. We are safe in His arms. Our God is strong.

(Excerpt from When Father is a Bad Word)

The story is told about Frank Szymanski, a center for the Notre Dame football team, who in the 1940s was called as a witness in a civil suit in South Bend. “Are you on the Notre Dame football team this year?” the judge asked.

Szmanski replied, “Yes, your Honor.”

The judge asked, “What position?”

“Center, your honor,” came the response.

“How good a center?” asked the judge.

Szymanski squirmed in his seat, then said firmly, “I am the best center Notre Dame ever had.”

Coach Frank Leahy, who was in courtroom, was surprised by the answer of the usually modest, unassuming Szymanski. When the proceedings were over, the coach took Szymanski aside and asked why he made such a statement.

Szymanski blushed and said, “I hated to do it, Coach, but, after all, I was under oath.”

As children adopted by the Heavenly Father, we must be unabashedly confident in knowing who we are.

In His love letter to the world God brags about us. He calls us beloved. Says we’re His lambs. He makes it clear that He delights in being our Daddy; that He treasures spending time with us. He invites us to share with Him our dreams and desires, our problems and pain. He cares so much about us that He offers us love without condition and grace without exception. The Creator of the Universe is pleased to call you and me His own. 

That is the truth and nothing but the truth.  

“To minimize or deny what we feel is a distortion of what it means to be image bearers of our personal God.  To the degree that we are unable to express our emotions, we remain impaired in our ability to love God, others, and ourselves well.” --Peter Scazzaro

 

I find it interesting that of all the incredibly amazing things the disciples saw Jesus do, Scripture records only one thing that the disciples asked Him to teach them how to do. 

Now, bear in mind, these guys saw Jesus some pretty unbelievable things. They watched Him make blind people see and deaf people hear, just by touching them. Pretty cool, huh? They stood in awe as he fed over 5,000 people with just a couple loaves of bread and five fish fillets. That would impress your friends. They were at a wedding reception with Him and saw Him with their own eyes change water into wine. That would make you popular at parties! 

Yet, the disciples did ask Him to teach them how to do any of these things. Nor did they ask Him His secret in calming a storm and walking on water and bringing dead people back to life so they could do the same.

There is but one thing the disciples saw Jesus do that they needed to know how to do themselves. They asked, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1, NIV). Why? Because they saw the difference it made in Him. Jesus quite often wandered off to spend some alone time with His Father. And the change in Him after being in the Father's presence was so obvious that the disciples asked, Will You teach us how to do that?

We would be wise to carve out regular time alone with our Heavenly Father as well; to make it a habit to spend private time with Him on a regular basis. To share with Him our desires. To be reminded of His. To seek His wisdom, His forgiveness, His blessing. To thank Him for already blessing us more than we deserve. Or, to simply crawl up in His lap and feel the warmth, the security, the tenderness of His embrace.

And we, too, can expect to be changed. So much so that others around us will notice. The truth is, we can’t have a soul encounter with God and come back unchanged.

We must strive to look forward, recognizing what's behind us, but not making the past our primary focus. There's a reason the windshield is much bigger than the rear-view mirror.

"When trials come, we should not ask, 'How can I get out of this?' but, 'What can I get out of this?'"--Warren Wiersbe

I don't need people to remind me that I'm carrying a lot of baggage. I need people to help me unpack.

(Excerpt from When Father is a Bad Word)

Without the consistent, loving touch of a father a child is more prone to experience sadness, loneliness, and isolation. Young children who lack a significant amount of positive touch from their fathers are, as they grow older, inclined to be more aggressive and violent than those who were nurtured by a loving dad who routinely hugged, cuddled, and kissed them. The lack of a father’s touch can also have an adverse effect on a child’s sexual development.

Zig Ziglar in his book, Better than Good, shares the startling findings of Dr. Ross Campbell, a psychiatrist from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Campbell stated that in all of his years of research and practice he has never known an adult of either gender with a sexual dysfunction who had a father who was kind, gentle, loving, thoughtful, affectionate, considerate, and patient. 

A father’s hands can build his child’s life or tear it apart.