I grew up praying often.  My family regularly prayed together – saying and singing blessings before meals, saying the Lord’s Prayer together, using the offices in the liturgy for the call-and-response-style formal prayers during family worship, or even singing a little prayerful tune while stopped at a red light that my Mom made up because we were late for one thing or another.

“Lord, we need a green light; please let the light turn green, thank you!”

And even today I find myself quietly talking to the Lord, asking for patience, or energy, or perhaps more accurately – just company as I bumble through a sticky interaction.  I find it very centering to talk to Someone throughout my day.

Recently one of my kids was upset about thing after thing going wrong and tearfully said something to the effect of hoping that the Lord would bless him by giving him what he wanted.  He was having a moment of feeling clear that he was working hard at doing the right thing and surely if the Lord loved him this should be demonstrated by getting what he wanted.

I didn’t have the answer I wanted in that moment, but I said something about it being always good to pray and to talk to the Lord about things, but that even if we don’t get what we want that isn’t a sign that the Lord doesn’t love us.

In the weeks since that conversation I’ve been thinking about prayer.  Even as a kid I didn’t love the song praying for the light to turn green. It felt technically wrong to me – the traffic patterns had to flow and follow their rules, and it wasn’t any kind of fair for the Lord to change that for us! What would that mean for the other drivers who were probably also late?

We have sorted out our publishing and distribution problems (we think!), and we will resume publishing new articles next week. We are currently publishing an article every other week.

We’re sorry that our email distribution problems meant we published a few articles that really didn’t get seen.  This week we are going to try and send out those articles and next week we’ll publish a new article.

Because of the change in systems we need everyone to re-subscribe if you want to receive emails when a new post goes up.  It should be very simple and easy though – just go and enter your email on the Subscribe tab. The interface and email will look a little bit different, but our hope is that it will essentially function the same way it did before – you will get an email with the article itself in the email, but all comments and conversation will happen directly on the website.

We’re glad you’re here and look forward to some wonderful articles and useful conversations in the coming. year.

Hi Friends,

We are having a few technical problems – particularly with our subscriptions and email distribution of new posts. Something happened at the start of the year and we were slow to realize it. Apologies to our writers and our readers! We are going to pause publishing new articles while we sort this out.

Thanks for your patience, we hope to be back to our normal schedule soon!

Abby