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by
Tyler Staton
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July 16 - September 8, 2025
Praying the Examen is the practice of recognizing God in hindsight. It’s the practice of remembering when, on this day, our hearts were burning as he walked alongside us. And as we learn to recognize God in hindsight, the most amazing thing happens. Slowly but surely, we learn to recognize God in the present—to
All of you now permanently carry what the prophets of old had at particular times for particular purposes. That’s why this gift is called “prophecy” in the New Testament. It is the ordinary practice of what was extraordinary before the risen Jesus breathed on all of us.
If the foundation of our lives is biblical truth, the shape of our lives should be prophetic.
It was time to rest, and I knew how to slow down my body, but my mind was a different story.
maybe instead of telling God, “I’m here if you want to say anything,” we’d ask, “God, what are you saying today? Is there something you want to say to someone else through me?”
Most people miss the voice of God not because it’s too strange but because it’s too familiar.
Revelation refers to the thought, image, or insight delivered to the listener by the Holy Spirit.
Interpretation is the process of deciphering divine intent and meaning from revelation.
Application is the final step. After receiving a revelation and deciphering the interpretation, ask, “What should I do with it?”
if you think you have a word for someone but, for whatever reason, can’t in good conscience offer it lovingly, give the word back to God and pray for love.20
Scripture never instructs us to silence or avoid the gift of prophecy because we fear it will be abused. Instead, Scripture teaches that prophecy surrenders to love (that’s for the speaker), and we honor the gift by weighing the word (that’s for the recipient).
That is the power of prophecy. It reveals Jesus coming after you everywhere you wander, ready to untangle every doubt you’ve battled, every insecurity you’ve struggled with, and every lie you’ve believed.
encouragement is prophecy by what you can see, and prophecy is encouragement by what only God can see.
When you encourage someone, you’re not just being nice; you’re being like God. You’re acting in harmony with his Spirit. How often do you use your words for that purpose?
Heaven, according to Jesus and the biblical authors, is not an escape. It’s a renewal—the renewal of the earth and the renewal of our bodies.
So if you’re wondering, “Is it God’s will to heal?” yes, of course God wills healing. God will heal all of our embodied pain. That’s a promise. What we’re unclear on is when and how healing will occur—in this life or the next, through a miracle now or through our eventual resurrection.
Salvation is a life, not just a rescue. Salvation includes forgiveness of sins but also goes beyond forgiveness to the redeemed life won by grace.
All healing this side of heaven is temporary. Everyone who gets miraculously healed will get sick or injured again.
Jesus was resurrected. Death couldn’t hold him. Lazarus was just resuscitated. He got more days, but death was still his fate.
Thomas Merton once said it is dangerous business to ask the Holy Spirit to help you because the Holy Spirit teaches us to die.1 And Jesus says that dying to self—losing our lives—is the only way to save them.
We, like the disciples, are forever susceptible to getting ahead of Jesus. Assuming we know the plot of the story, we rush into action rather than waiting on the Spirit to empower and guide our action.
The ministry of Jesus, energized by human willpower rather than the Holy Spirit, always results in pain. We may be well-intentioned, but the renewal of the world requires a greater wisdom than the human imagination and a greater power than human effort.
Theologian Michael Green writes, “The Comforter comes not in order to allow [people] to be comfortable, but to make them missionaries . . . it is the Spirit who energizes the evangelism of the Church and drives its often unwilling members into the task for which God laid his hand on them: mission.”6
Everyone’s preaching a gospel. Jesus’ witnesses are simply those of us preaching his gospel. And the gospel of Jesus Christ goes something like this: There’s an infinitely loving Creator who designed you for life so full you’ve only tasted it in drops. And his great passion is to heal and redeem you all the way through until you’re swimming in that life. And he has supplied everything you need for full life and everlasting relationship with him. And he won’t stop till the whole world is blanketed in heaven.
To speak about the love of Jesus is not, first and foremost, to try to convince your coworkers of exclusive truth claims at the Friday evening happy hour. It’s just being completely honest about your relationship to God in an environment where you’re probably used to compartmentalizing your spirituality. To share about the growth, challenges, breakthroughs, and practices of your spiritual life freely. To invite others into your life of prayer, sabbath, and community. To live not manipulatively but honestly before all people, regardless of the setting. That’s it.
Every day, ask God to open your eyes to his invisible but invading Kingdom.
what will matter most is how you loved the people you got to live your days alongside. All our stories will get weighed on the scale of love.
Jesus’ definition of justice does not end with a need met but with a family restored.
Suffering tends to be both where we look hardest for God and where God is most difficult to find.
Thomas Keating wrote, “In the dark nights . . . the rituals and practices that previously supported our faith and devotion, fail us. Faith becomes simply belief in God’s goodness without any test of it. It is trusting in God without knowing whom we are trusting, because the relationship we thought we had with God has disappeared.”1
Suffering cannot and should not be dismissed as inevitable or swept under the rug in general. Because while everyone in history has suffered, no one has ever suffered as you’ve suffered.
God told one story. The serpent told another. Humanity believed the serpent, and the world as we know it is the product of the lie our ancestors believed.
living outside of Eden has consequences. Death and sin have infected the very world we live in, and all suffering is a symptom of sin (the world we chose) not God (the good world he created).
God is a parent whose heart is disproportionately drawn to the suffering child.
Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. We weave narratives that integrate the events of our lives into a coherent whole, a plot.
we do not get a choice in our suffering as God works to re-create the world in his image. We do, however, get to choose what our suffering does to us.
Suffering is connected to glory because suffering—like nothing else in this life—avails us the opportunity to become like Jesus in this chaotic and corrupted world.
The Holy Spirit is at work not only in our mountaintop moments but also (and often most profoundly) in the valley of the shadow of death, converting our surrendered suffering into love, compassion, gratitude, groaning, and, ultimately, redemption.
Suffering exposes our weakness and fragility, and that, when offered to others, is both an act of love and an invitation to be loved.
Properly endured, suffering gives way to compassion, which is a frequent descriptor of the character of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, our English word “compassion,” traced to its origins, literally means “co-suffer.” To be compassionate is to willingly enter into the suffering of another.
Whether we like it or not, we are going to share in the world’s sufferings. Suffering is not evenly distributed—we all suffer in different ways and to varying degrees.
even the suffering we experience in this world—the “groaning as in the pains of childbirth”—points to the promise of new life: a world without suffering, when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, shelter us in his loving presence, and redeem every pain we’ve ever felt.
The wounds we carry on our bodies are storytellers. Wrinkles tell the story of the days we’ve lived and the days we’ve endured. Calluses tell the story of the steps we’ve walked through green pastures and death valleys alike. Scars tell the stories of the hurts we’ve felt, the pain we’ve endured, the tears we’ve cried, and the blood we’ve shed.
Lament is significant because it names and personalizes suffering. We cannot groan with the Spirit in our own pain or enter into the pain of another if suffering has no name and face.
Harold S. Kushner, “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”17
Yet the Spirit’s fruit and gifts are not at odds but interconnected. Sought apart from each other, they are at best incomplete and at worst dysfunctional. The meeting point of these streams, where they flow together producing a powerful current, is community—local, rooted, often underwhelming, and ultimately transformative community.
His conclusion is that a robust sense of community and an embodied counterculture does more to draw out the human heart than comfort, wealth, ease, or social “progress” ever could.
Our societies are profoundly individualized and anticommunal, and we are bouncing from place to place, city to city, school district to school district, like never before in human history.
transient people pursue “duty-free relationships” and flee “obligatory relationships.” They pursue “personal forms of subjective well-being” (based on self-esteem and the verification of the individualized self) and tend to discount and discard “interpersonal forms of subjective well-being” (based on social support and the building up of the community).
the Western world has an increasingly high view of the self and celebrates autonomy . . . and an increasingly low view of community. Acted out, that idea makes us lonely, anxious, sick, and insecure—medically and psychologically speaking.
