Formed by grace, for the glory of God.

There is a preacher who imagined the hosts of heaven leaning over the rail of glory, watching the Son of God face down in the dirt of Gethsemane, sweating like a man bleeding, and asking one another a single question.

Not chronologically, but honestly. You can say words at any point in the day. But the thing that Scripture calls prayer, the thing that bends a life, tends to begin at the exact moment a person runs out of options.

That is not rhetorical, and it is not a scolding. I am genuinely asking, because I do it, and I would like to know why.

If the only time we trust God is when he gives us what we asked for, we are living in an elementary view of grace.

I keep coming back to that because of what it does to my sense of scale.

I want to sit with that, because we skip past it every time and it is the whole mechanism.

Because we hear it as an instruction to do something more, and more often, and for longer. And so we try, and we fail, and we quietly file it away with the verses that are for other people.

My favorite psalm is Psalm 42, and I do not think that is an accident.