What to Do When Family Gatherings Are Stressful

What to Do When Family Gatherings Are Stressful

Most families have at least one person or one dynamic that makes the holidays more tense than the greeting cards suggest, and you can feel braced before you sit down. This episode looks at how to move from keeping a fragile peace to making it, starting with prayer long before the gathering does. Almost every family has at least one person, or one dynamic, that makes getting together more stressful than the photos suggest. The brother-in-law who needles you about politics until you say something you regret. The sibling you haven't really spoken to in years, now sharing a kitchen with you and pretending it's normal. By the time you sit down at the table, you're already braced. You've run the scenarios and decided which comments you'll let slide. That's an exhausting way to love your own family, and it's more common than the cheerful holiday images let on. Julie Plagens knows the extreme version. She grew up in a Dallas home that looked spiritually buttoned-up, with a father who pastored two megachurches. Then she and her husband walked away from the faith and the family both, and the bitterness she held toward her parents and God knotted her up so badly it showed up in her body as Crohn's disease. She spent seven years away. When she finally felt called back, the bridges were gone, too much had been said, and nobody was willing to budge. So she did the one thing left to her. She set aside two days to fast and pray, trusting a God who raises the dead to breathe life into a relationship that looked finished. Two days in, her father called and extended an olive branch. Jesus spoke a blessing over people who step into this kind of tension. Matthew 5:9 says God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God. The word matters: He blessed the peacemakers, which asks more of us than peacekeeping does. Peacekeeping is biting your tongue and managing the room so nothing blows up; it holds a fragile calm and costs you something every time. Peacemaking is active. It moves toward what's broken to put it back together, which is slower work and far more like what God does. Here's the part worth being clear-eyed about. Your difficult relative probably won't change because you held your peace one more year. But the dynamic between you can start to shift when you do something different on your end, when you pray for that person by name instead of dreading them. It's difficult to keep seeing someone as the enemy while you're asking God to bless them. The dread loosens, your guard comes down, and sometimes the other person feels the change before they understand it. In this episode, Bart is candid that his own family gatherings have been calm, a gift he doesn't take for granted, and he draws on years of counseling people for whom they are anything but. The encouragement is practical: the work of peace usually starts on your knees, long before you reach the table. You do the working. You let God make the call. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why most family tension is more common than the holiday images admit * The difference between keeping the peace and making it, and why it matters * How praying for the relative you dread can change the dynamic between you You can't control how everyone behaves around the table, but you can be the one who works for peace. That work usually starts in prayer, long before the gathering does. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/266 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/266] Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail] Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast. https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/] Rate and Review https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/] Connect with Bart Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusyliveshttps://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives [https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives] Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com] Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus https://daily-devotions-for-busy-lives.kit.com/b33aa395d1here: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe].

What to Do When Your Sin Has Consequences You Have to Live With

God's forgiveness is full and final, yet the wreckage you caused is sometimes still there in the morning. This episode looks at how to live forward when you've been forgiven but the harvest remains, and why grace climbs down into the consequences with you. There's a place the church doesn't talk about often enough. You did something, you've owned it, and you've confessed it to God. You know, as sure as you know anything, that He has forgiven you completely. The slate with Him is clean. But the marriage still ended. The trust is still gone. You wake up every morning in a life your own decision shaped, and you can't undo it. We're good at celebrating forgiveness. We're less good at standing with someone who is forgiven and still bleeding. That gap between a clean slate before God and a life still in pieces is one of the loneliest places a believer can live. In January 2026, Philip Yancey, the author of the most widely read Christian book on grace, confessed publicly to an eight-year affair. At 76, he retired from writing and speaking and said he had nothing left to stand on except God's mercy and grace. His wife, Janet, released her own statement, speaking from devastation, yet choosing to keep a marriage vow she made more than 55 years ago. Both of them now live in the life his choices shaped, asking God to do what they cannot do for themselves. Paul named how this works, and he didn't soften it. Galatians 6:7-8 says you will always harvest what you plant. That isn't cruelty; it's the truth about how life works. Sin has a yield, and you can be fully forgiven while the seeds you planted still come up. Forgiveness clears your guilt before God, but it doesn't always reverse the consequences in time. David was forgiven for what he did with Bathsheba, and the fallout still rolled through his family for years. Grace is complete, and the harvest is real, both at once. Here is the part that can save your life in that place. Grace doesn't hand you forgiveness and then leave you to clean up the rubble alone. It comes with you into the consequences. God doesn't forgive you and step back to watch from a distance; He climbs down into the wreckage and starts building something there. Your story isn't over because of what you did. He is still writing it, from exactly where you are now, harvest and all. That single truth changes how you face the morning after. In this episode, Bart draws on years of pastoral ministry, being in the room with people on the worst day of their lives, some who came to confess a sin they knew would change everything. The encouragement is practical and grounded: preach the truth back to yourself out loud, and take one small step to tend the life you're in now. You can't replant last year, but you can care for what's growing today. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why God's complete forgiveness doesn't always erase the consequences of your choices * What Galatians 6:7-8 means by harvesting what you plant * How grace meets you inside the wreckage and keeps writing your story Forgiveness from God is complete, and even when the consequences remain, He is right there in them. You can't replant the past, but you can tend what's growing now. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/265 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/265] Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail] Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast. https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/] Rate and Review https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/] Connect with Bart Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusyliveshttps://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives [https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives] Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com] Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus https://daily-devotions-for-busy-lives.kit.com/b33aa395d1here: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe].

What to Do When You've Become Cynical

Cynicism rarely shows up all at once; it builds one disappointment at a time until you brace for the worst from people and from God. This episode looks at why that worn-down trust feels like wisdom but works like a trap, and how Paul and the research point to hope as a choice you reach for. Cynicism doesn't arrive all at once. It builds, one disappointment at a time: the coworker who lied to your face, the headline that hands you fresh proof every morning that people are awful and getting worse. By the time you notice, you're bracing for the worst from everyone, and somewhere along the way you stopped expecting much from God too. The worst part is that cynicism feels like wisdom. It feels like you've finally wised up and can't be fooled anymore. But it works like a slow poison, shrinking your life and walling you off from the very people, and the very God, who could do you good. Jamil Zaki, a Stanford psychologist, knows the pull firsthand. His research shows that most people are far kinder and more generous than the average person assumes. Yet during the pandemic, he spent his days defending human goodness and his nights doomscrolling into the same loop of outrage and bad news, until the man who studied kindness had become a cynic. So he started studying that too. What he found is that cynicism feels like wisdom but functions like a trap. Cynical people tend to earn less, struggle more with depression, and die younger than those who hold on to hope. He surveyed thousands of students and found that most of them wanted to make friends and enjoyed helping others, yet assumed the people around them were cold and indifferent. They were surrounded by people who wanted to connect and couldn't see it, because they had already decided the answer was no. Paul understood this long before the research caught up. Writing to believers facing real persecution and loss, he said in Romans 12:12, "Rejoice in our confident hope. Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying." Every command there is a verb, something you do rather than something you wait to feel. Paul wasn't writing to people who felt hopeful. He was telling people with every earthly reason to despair to reach for hope on purpose. Biblical hope is a discipline, a decision about where you fix your eyes when the evidence around you screams the opposite. Paul made that decision under persecution, and asked the Romans to make it under theirs. In this episode, Bart speaks from his own years in law enforcement, where hearing constant lies and seeing people at their worst made him cynical without his ever choosing it. What pulls him back is consistent time in God's Word and the company of sincere people who want to live well. The cynic believes he's protecting himself, when he's slowly starving himself. Hope, it turns out, is both the holier path and the wiser one, and it gets stronger every time you choose it. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why cynicism feels like wisdom while working against you * What Jamil Zaki's research reveals about the hidden cost of refusing to trust * Why Romans 12:12 treats hope as a verb you choose, not a feeling you wait for Hope is a choice you make and a muscle you build. Reach for it on purpose, and keep your mind fixed on Christ when the evidence says don't bother. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/264 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/264] Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail] Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast. https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/] Rate and Review https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/] Connect with Bart Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusyliveshttps://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives [https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives] Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com] Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus https://daily-devotions-for-busy-lives.kit.com/b33aa395d1here: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe]. Mentioned in this episode: Join Our Private Facebook Community If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

What to Do When Your Child Is Struggling and You Can't Reach Them

Few things ache like watching your child struggle when you've lost the access you used to have and there's nothing you can do to fix it. This episode looks at what to do with that helplessness, and how a grieving King David points the way toward loving and praying when you can't reach them. There’s a helplessness that comes with watching your own child struggle. You can see they're in pain, or drifting somewhere you can't follow, and the access you used to have is gone. The conversations you once had don't happen anymore, and the child you knew inside and out feels like a stranger some days. You lie awake at three in the morning replaying everything, wondering what you could have done differently. The worst part is the powerlessness. You would trade places with them in a heartbeat, and you can't. Mary DeMuth knew that place. She has written more than 50 books on faith and family, and when her three adult children walked away from the faith she raised them in, she did what she had spent years teaching others to do: she tried to fix it. She lectured, she reasoned, she circled back to conversations she had already had, and every attempt strained the relationship a little more. Then someone at a conference looked at her and said, "Your children know that you love them," and she burst into tears. That was the moment she stopped being the fixer and became the mother who stayed in the relationship and prayed. Scripture does not flinch from this kind of grief. When David's son Absalom betrayed him, tried to seize the throne, and died in the fighting, David fell apart. He cried out, "O my son Absalom! My son, my son." This was a father whose child had tried to destroy him, and what poured out was not rage but grief. A parent's love does not switch off when a child goes wrong. God built it that way, and He never asks you to stop loving a child who is far from where you wish they were. But loving a child and controlling one are two different things. You can love someone with everything in you and still have no power to fix what they are walking through. That is exactly where prayer stops being a last resort and becomes the main thing you can do. When you cannot reach your child, you can reach the God who can, and you can hand Him the one you cannot hold. In this episode, Bart draws on years of walking with families in this exact grief. It never gets easier on the parent, and harping at a child almost always drives them further away, however right you are. What holds is trusting God with the child you cannot control. Mary found that releasing her children to the God who loved them first was both the most difficult thing and the most freeing. Her children know she loves them. That was where God told her to start. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why the helplessness of an unreachable child is its own kind of grief * What David's raw weeping over Absalom shows about a parent's love * Why prayer, not pressure, is the strongest thing you can do when you can't reach them Where your child goes isn't yours to control. What's yours is to keep loving them and to keep trusting them to the God who loves them even more than you do. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/263 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/263] Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail] Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast. https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/] Rate and Review https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/] Connect with Bart Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusyliveshttps://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives [https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives] Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com] Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus https://daily-devotions-for-busy-lives.kit.com/b33aa395d1here: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe]. Mentioned in this episode: Join Our Private Facebook Community If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group

What to Do When You've Lost Your Job

Losing a job changes more than your bank account; it shakes your sense of who you are and leaves you wondering how long the in-between will last. This episode looks at how God meets people in that stretch, and why His provision tends to arrive in a shape you never planned for. Losing a job hits more than your bank account. It shakes how you see yourself, because a lot of who we think we are gets tied to what we do. The mornings feel strange without the thing that used to give the day a shape. You wake up with nowhere to be, the question of what you did wrong circling in the background, and no idea how long the stretch ahead will last. The not-knowing wears on you as much as the missing paycheck does. Keith Mitchell knew that stretch. In July 2023, his position was eliminated, and over the next eight months he applied to more than 100 jobs. All of it produced one in-person interview and four phone calls. He kept a folder on his phone titled "Current Petitions to God," where he wrote his prayers as if they had already been answered, and he kept writing and kept applying. By January 2024, he and his wife sensed God telling them something they didn't expect: stop applying, and just trust. So he stopped. Stopping took its own kind of faith. Scripture has a word for that in-between. Near the end of a long life, David wrote in Psalm 37:25 that he had never once seen the godly abandoned or their children begging for bread. That isn't a promise that the next paycheck lands on your schedule, or that provision looks the way you pictured. It usually arrives in a shape you didn't expect, from a direction you weren't watching. But it arrives. And God doesn't waste the waiting. He uses the stretch with no job and no answer yet to do work in you that the busy version of your life never had room for. Some of the deepest growth comes in months you would never have chosen. On March 18, 2024, a recruiter Keith had never contacted emailed him about a position he had never applied to. She had found his resume online. The job became, in his words, a direct answer to the prayer he had written months earlier, with compensation and benefits beyond what he could have planned for himself. It didn't come through any of the 100 applications he sent. It came through the one God lined up without him. In this episode, Bart shares his own experience of losing a good-paying job and finding a better one the very next week, while making clear that not every wait is that short. The encouragement runs both ways. You keep doing the practical work, the applications and the calls, and you hold it all loosely, trusting that the God who has never abandoned His people can open a door you never knocked on. Your worth was never in the job you lost. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why losing a job shakes your identity, not only your finances * What David's lifelong testimony in Psalm 37:25 says about God's provision * How to keep working while you wait, without trying to hold the whole thing alone The God who has never abandoned His people isn't about to start with you. His provision is already on the way, even when you can't see it yet. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/262 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/262] Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemail] Want to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast. https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/] Rate and Review https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/ [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/] Connect with Bart Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusyliveshttps://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives [https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylives] Website: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com] Feeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus https://daily-devotions-for-busy-lives.kit.com/b33aa395d1here: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe]. Mentioned in this episode: Join Our Private Facebook Community If you're looking for a place to connect with other Daily Devotions listeners and pray for each other, I'd love for you to join our private Facebook community group. Come find us at https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/group