Reaching the End of Your Rope

I boarded the plane to Ethiopia feeling anxious and afraid. That summer, I was leading a small team of women to serve alongside a missionary in a remote Muslim city, and nothing seemed to be going as planned. I could see the concern on the faces of those who organised the trip as they dropped us off at the airport.

We had been unable to reach the missionary for some time, and our travel plans had changed. This was before smartphones - WhatsApp didn’t exist - so we had no idea what we were flying into. I felt helpless and feared making foolish decisions that would put these women at risk. So, I prayed, desperately asking God for help.

Isn’t that how God often works in our lives? We reach the end of our rope, unable to control the circumstances around us, and cry out to him. In those moments, he is at work doing far more than “all that we ask or think” (Eph 3:20), revealing truths about himself that anchor our anxious hearts in him. In the same way, God mercifully heard my cry on that plane and answered my prayer in ways that sustained me through the hardships of that summer.

I learned many things in Ethiopia, but above all, I learned about prayer.

Prayer humbles our self-reliant hearts and teaches us to depend on God. The world around us places a high value on self-sufficiency, as if all we need to conquer any challenge is found within ourselves. But Scripture tells a very different story of our helplessness. We were lost in our sin, and Christ came to save us from ourselves. When we pray, we rest in that reality and express our dependence on God. Prayer teaches us to rely on the promises of God's all-sufficient grace to supply every need of ours in Christ Jesus (Phil 4.19).

Prayer must be grounded in God’s Word. In his book on prayer, Tim Keller writes of the tragedy of untethered prayer. “Without immersion in God’s Word, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow, but also untethered from reality. We may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish God and life to be like.” What we believe about God shapes the way we pray. Immersing ourselves in the greatness and glory of God in Scripture tethers our prayers to soul-steadying truth.

Prayer is the great privilege of the children of God. One staggering reality of our new life in Christ is that we have been adopted into the family of God (Eph 1.5). As children of God, we can approach our heavenly Father with confidence and bring every cry of our heart to him, because he loves and cares for us. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3.1).

In times of uncertainty, when we reach the end of ourselves, we can run into the arms of our heavenly Father in prayer, knowing that he delights to do us good with all of his heart and soul (Jer 32.41) and to quiet our fearful hearts with his unshakable love (Zeph 3.17).

These articles are written without the use of generative AI.

When God Feels Far at Christmas

Christmas is supposed to be “merry and bright”, full of warmth, family, and joy. Yet for many, this season only magnifies what is missing. Empty chairs. Broken relationships. Lingering grief. Unanswered prayers. And in the quiet beneath the celebration, a question sometimes rises: Has God forgotten me?

One of the most honest prayers in the Bible opens this way through David:
 

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?” (Psalm 13.1-2)

This is not polished worship. This is raw. David names the full weight of his pain. He talks about emotional distress, anxious thoughts, enemies, shame, and sorrow that return day after day. He wonders if his suffering means God has forgotten him. Many of us feel that same tension at Christmas. We see lights everywhere, but inside it feels dark. We hear songs of joy, but inside, there is grief. We hear about hope, yet we feel stuck in cycles of despair. We wonder if God still sees us. David goes on to say,
 

“Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” (Psalm 13.3)

This is more than a prayer for relief, it is a prayer for clarity. “Light up my eyes.” In other words: Help me see You rightly. David understands that while feelings are real, they are not always reliable. Our emotions can describe our experience, but they do not define God’s reality. Feeling forgotten does not mean we are forgotten. At Christmas, this truth matters deeply. We may feel abandoned, but the manger declares otherwise. God does not move away from our darkness, He enters it.

Finally, I love David's resolve at the end.  He says,
 

“But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.” (Psalm 13.5-6)

Notice what has not changed. The enemies are still there. The feelings are still heavy. The waiting is still hard. And yet David discovers something that remains within his control: he can choose to trust, to rejoice, and to sing, even before circumstances change. His worship becomes an act of holy resistance against despair.

And this is where Christmas speaks most powerfully into the fear of being forgotten. The world waited four hundred years in silence between the last prophet and the first cry from the manger. Many must have wondered if God had abandoned His promises. But at just the right time, God did not send a message, He sent His Son (Gal 4:4). The birth of Jesus is heaven’s unmistakable answer to our deepest fear of being forgotten. So when Christmas feels heavy, when joy feels forced, when God seems silent, we can still ask our honest questions. We can still pray for light. And we can still sing!