Episodes

Familiar Christian music can hold you when nothing else quite does. Discover why the songs you've sung for years reach places words can't, and how God meets you in a melody when your faith feels dry. There's a comfort that comes the moment you hear the first few notes of a song you've known forever. Maybe it's a hymn you sang as a kid, standing next to your mother in the pew. Maybe it's the one they play at every funeral you've been to. Before you've thought about a single word, something in yo...

Most of us have a friend we've slowly let drift, and the longer we wait, the more awkward it feels to reach out. Discover why the fix is simpler than you think, and how to make the first move. A lot of us have a friend we used to be close to, and we can't quite remember when we stopped calling. Life sped up. New responsibilities came in. Somewhere in there the calls got rarer, then stopped, and neither of you meant for it to happen. Then one day their name crosses your mind, you realize how lon...

Watching your congregation shrink is a grief few people talk about. Discover why declining numbers don't get the final word, and how Jesus keeps building His church even when yours feels small. If you love a local church, a shrinking congregation can be depressing. You stand at the back and count, and there are fewer heads than a year ago, far fewer than five years back. You know the empty seats by name: the family that moved for a job, the couple that slowly stopped coming. Every absence is a ...

You watch another couple, and something in you twists. They finish each other's sentences. They laugh at each other's jokes in a way you and your spouse haven't in a long time. You drive home from that dinner feeling worse than when you walked in, taking inventory of everything your own marriage seems to be missing. The comparison feels like information, as if you're seeing the truth about their marriage and yours side by side. But the comparison is rigged. You're measuring what they let you see...

When a close friend disappears without a word, the world rarely treats it as a loss. Discover why that grief is allowed, and how David and Jesus both knew the sting of being abandoned by a friend. One of the more disorienting hurts in life is when someone who was close to you disappears. No explanation, no conversation. They just stopped responding, and now weeks or months have gone by. Because there was no ending and no reason given, your mind goes to work trying to supply one. You run back th...

Always being available may look like generosity, but it slowly drains you dry. Discover why Jesus withdrew from people who needed Him, and how his example frees you to be unreachable sometimes. Some of us take pride in being reachable. The text gets answered the second it comes in. You never turn down the request for coffee, and you never let a call go unanswered. From the outside it looks like generosity, and part of it is love. But some of it is something else, a person who has never learned ...

Feeling guilty for being okay when people around you aren't is more common than you'd think. Discover why you can stop apologizing for your stable life, and how God means for you to spend it on others. Sometimes the trouble is that your life is holding together while someone close to you is falling apart. Your marriage is solid and theirs is ending. Your kids are fine while someone else's are in crisis. Instead of being grateful, you feel almost ashamed of it. You hide the good news and downpla...

Watching a parent lose their memory is a grief that starts long before anyone dies. Discover why that grief counts, and how numbering your days helps you love the parent who's here today. There's a grief that comes long before the funeral. It shows up when your father asks the same question three times in an hour, or when your mother calls you by your brother's name. The person who raised you is losing pieces of themselves right in front of you, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. You go...

Every praying Christian goes through stretches where the words feel automatic. You bow your head, and the same phrases come out that always come out, the ones you learned years ago and reach for at meals and at bedtime. Somewhere along the way you stopped hearing them, and you can't remember the last time one of those prayers meant something as you said it. It can start to feel fake, like you're reciting lines to an audience of one. This episode opens with a small experiment you can try. Pick a...

Most people have a preferred way to numb out when life gets uncomfortable. The scroll. The extra hour of TV. Neither is wrong by itself. But when one of them becomes the place you run every single time you don't want to feel what you're feeling, it stops being a break and starts being an escape hatch. And the more you use it, the better you get at not feeling anything at all. This episode opens with a research experiment. People were put alone in a bare room for 15 minutes with no phone and not...

Some Christians are the only person in their extended family who prays for the rest of them. There's the spouse who doesn't believe, and the grown kids who walked away from the faith they were raised in. Somehow the job of bringing that whole family before the Lord has fallen to one person, and that person is you. Nobody assigned it. You just love them, and you seem to be the only one on your knees. It can feel lonely and pointless, like your prayers go up and nothing comes down. This episode o...

The fear of getting old alone is one people don't talk about much, but it lives in a lot of hearts. Some pictured a spouse walking through the later years with them, and that person never came. Others raised kids who grew up and moved across the country, and now they lie awake wondering who will be there when they can't drive themselves to the doctor, and who would even notice if they got sick. It's a frightening thing to wonder about, and most people wonder in silence. This episode opens at a ...

You took the job. You said yes to the person. You made the move and signed the papers. And now you're a few months or a few years in, and you catch yourself wondering if you got it right. Second-guessing is common, and it isn't always a red flag. Sometimes it's grief, a mourning for the roads you didn't take and the life that might have been down the one you passed up. This episode opens with Grace, who left a secure job after 2 years, sure God was calling her to become a teacher, and enrolled ...

Every long-term Bible reader hits verses they struggle with. A command that sounds harsh. A line that seems to contradict something you were taught to believe about God. The pull is to slide past it and stick with the parts that comfort you. Most of us have a private list of verses we've been avoiding for years. Bart hears it often. People bring him the verse that bothers them, half expecting him to be shocked, and he tells them: don't skip it, stay with it. This episode opens with Martin Luthe...

A close relationship with an adult child doesn't come standard, and it's easy to stop noticing it. Discover why John called this the greatest joy, and how to receive it with gratitude. This episode is for the parents whose grown kids call. Whose kids text just to check in, or make room for you at the table when they didn't have to. That kind of relationship does not come standard. A grown child who wants you around is choosing you, over and over, with a life full of other options, and some part...

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 her...

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...

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 rais...

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 ...

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. Th...

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 chan...

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. ...

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 ...

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 sai...