Prayer

to
End
Isolation

O Holy Trinity …

The fallenness of this world, the system that runs it, and the enemy that occupies it has conspired to separate
us from you. Our own hearts, the people around us, and even the healing solace of beauty and the
invigorating wildness of nature are compromised, so we need you and invite you in.

These last few years, life has been really difficult, Lord. I feel it, and I still hurt over it. I miss the way things were
before COVID. I hated how if made me feel, and I hated how it made everyone around me seem like a
stranger. I hate how it added to the isolation of our culture.

I believe all this, O God, occurred within your design. Yet, I’m still a little frustrated, discouraged, and angry
about it.

Help me, God, to begin to ease up on, forgive, and be kind to those around me. Please warm and soften
the cold and hard places in my heart; and give me the ability again to just enjoy being with the people
around me—especially as we begin a new year. Help me, Lord, to slow down and give my soul a chance
to catch up! Lord, I connect with you and give you my heart again. And from that, help me to connect with
the people I so love and care about. And lastly, inspire me to playfully connect with nature and art and to
immerse myself in the goodness, truth, and beauty that’s all around me.

I love You, Father; I love You, Jesus; and I love you, Spirit. Breath on me, O Breath of I AM, and enable me to
not just love, but to become love—just like You.

Amen.

Words of Encouragement for Your Heart ...

My dear friend, may you hear these words, for they speak of you and of who you are:

You are fierce, you are powerful, you are strong.

You are a force of love and for love, a force to be reckoned with.

Remember this: You are at your strongest when you’re lifting the spirits of another. Remember, too, you’re
far more winsome, beautiful, intelligent, and resourceful than you may often think.

Far more so.

It’s never too late to live into the person God recreated you to be: His son (or daughter); and it’s never too
late to be the warrior of lovingkindness and the awakened Image Bearer of goodness, rightwiseness, and
deep, everlasting happiness Jesus lived, suffered, was crucified, died, rose from the dead, and ascended
to the Father for you to become who you truly are.
Sadly, most people in this life are asleep: Asleep, under a spell of the Evil One—just as you and I once
were. Sadly wandering through life (and, in many ways, by themselves), they stumble from one delusion to
another, from one craving to another, and from one crisis to another.

Let us awaken them!

Awaken them all by being who you are and by letting the weightiness of your happy, playful countenance
point them gently toward God our Source—the One who is the Source of All Life, Wakefulness, and Gladness.

Death isn’t what’s sad, friend. What’s sad is that so very few people ever really live. Join God in helping
those you love to awaken to the gift of life Jesus is to them. And awaken, too, to the precious life-gift they
are to those around them.

Indeed, inside you, inside me, inside everyone are the seeds of world class greatness just waiting to sprout,
grow, fruit, and flower. God planted them there. Let them be watered with life’s most blissful joys and its
deepest heartaches; and let them be fertilized with life’s greatest victories and its most devastating losses.
Why run from pain, O dear one, when God can use it to bring about such illumination, renewal, and whole-
heartedness to you and those around you? To become “joy incarnate,” you must traverse the valleys of
sorrow. While working to end suffering (and its sources), don’t run from it. Rather, stay put, and stay the
course; you and everyone around you will be the better (and richer) for it.

May who you are, in all your God-given resplendence, be drawn forth by the lovingkindness of the One who
not just sees and knows you thoroughly, but—like water in a sponge—dwells with you intimately and loves
you through and through. To know you intimately is to love you. In fact, these two qualities, knowing you
and loving you, are symbiotic: One cannot (at least in its fullest sense) exist without the other. God knows
you thoroughly and loves you through and through. Open yourself up to others so they can know and love
you, too. Everyone benefits from this.

Don’t give up doing what you love; rather, mine the love in and from what you do. Remember this: It’s the
great enthusiasms; the risky journeys; the soul-immersing searches, questions, curiosities, and heartaches—
and not so much the temporal acquisitions—that spur whole-heartedness and lasting happiness.

Know this: In life, you’ll never be better than anyone else; in the same way, you’ll never be less.

In all things, and at all times, be happy; don’t be afraid to let others see you laugh or cry, or to let them feel
the weight of who you are. May your light (tiny as it may be) be a guide; may your roof be another’s floor;
and may you have the kind of courageous, loving humility that inspires those around you to give themselves
away to God, life, and those around them. This is true selflessness in its most vulnerable and generative
offering.

When you inspire those you love to “become love,” you inspire them to live out the greatest of all life-
adventures: The ever-deepening experience of loving God, loving themselves well (ordinately), loving the
people around them well, and loving God’s creation well—all at the right times, in the right ways, in the right
places and spaces, and with just the right measures and leverages. This is fullness, O dear one—a shedding
of tears kind of fullness; and it’s a fullness no amount of earthly fame, fortune, power, or cultural influence
can create. It is this integratedness of being—this transcendent uniting with Papa, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and
the whole of creation, that alone creates not just a life worth living but a life-giving legacy worthy of those
created, crafted, and groomed by God to live as His unfolding lights … as His unique image-bearers… as
His lovers.

With lowliness of soul, O dear one, push forward—beyond your fears—and just be you. Go forth, and just be
awesome.