Finding God's Presence in Life's Worst Moments

The Costly Parts of Leading Anyone

Leadership of any kind carries a cost most people never see, and trying to absorb all of it eventually wears a leader down and spreads to everyone around them. This episode looks at why one person was never meant to do it alone, and the help God built into leadership from the start. Leadership has a price tag most people never notice. The decisions you make alone, with no one to share the blame if they go wrong. The criticism you take and let stand. The patience you keep extending to people who may never return it. Whether you lead a team, a congregation, or a family, the part that wears on you is the part nobody can see, and the part nobody thinks to check on. There's data behind that feeling. A 2025 report in Fortune, drawing on research in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that burnout gets more expensive the higher up it goes. A burned-out individual contributor costs an organization around $4,000 a year. A manager costs more than double that, and an executive higher still. The reason is what researchers call the social contagion effect: when a drained leader walks into a room, the mood of everyone in it drops, even before a word is spoken. Employee engagement researcher Leah Phifer named the root of it as mattering erosion, the slow accumulation of small losses, and asked the question that lands hardest: who's supporting the support? Scripture put that question on the table a long time ago. In Exodus 18, Moses was settling every dispute among the Israelites from morning to night, doing every job himself, with no one asking how he was holding up. His father-in-law, Jethro, watched for a single day and told him plainly that he was going to wear himself out, and the people with him. Then Jethro gave him a plan: appoint capable, trustworthy leaders, let them handle the smaller matters, and bring only the major cases to Moses. As he put it, they will help carry the load and make the task lighter. The fix for an overwhelmed leader was not more willpower. It was distribution. One person absorbing everything was never God's design, because one person absorbing everything eventually breaks, and the people downstream pay for it. Jethro saw the pattern thousands of years before a research team put a dollar figure on it. The help was already built in; Moses just had to be willing to use it. In this episode, Bart speaks from his own experience of leadership, including the cost of absorbing criticism and choosing to let God handle it rather than defend himself. The encouragement runs in two directions. If you're the one doing every job, handing part of it off might be the most responsible move you can make. And if you're pouring into everyone while no one pours into you, that deserves your attention this week. The leader needs a leader. You were never meant to be the one who only gives, and the strongest thing you can do for the people you lead is to make sure you don't run dry. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why the hardest costs of leading are the ones no one else can see * What current burnout research reveals about how a drained leader affects everyone around them * What Jethro's counsel in Exodus 18 shows about God's design for sharing the load You weren't built to absorb everything. Asking for help is how you keep leading the people who depend on you. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/254 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/254] 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

How to Care for a Loved One Without Losing Yourself

When you're caring for someone you love through decline, the part that wears on you most is the grief no one recognizes and the drain that never lets up. This episode names what you've been feeling and points to the mercy that begins fresh every morning, enough for one more day. When someone you love starts to decline, the role that lands on you can be one of the most disorienting things you'll ever do. The person who once held things together now needs you to hold things together for them, and the switch doesn't happen cleanly. There are the appointments and the worry that won't shut off. And there's a kind of grief most people never name, even though that's what it is. You're losing them in pieces while you're still trying to honor them, and the world has no category for grieving someone who's still right in front of you. The wearing-down rarely comes from one dramatic crisis. It comes from the sameness, the same tasks today that you'll do again tomorrow, with no finish line in view. You can love someone with everything in you and still feel yourself running empty. Wanda Medina knew that exhaustion from the inside. Her husband, Hector, a 20-year FBI agent who had always been gentle and thoughtful, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's at 56. The man she had built her life with began to disappear, his temper rising and his patience gone, and she slid into a depression she couldn't shake. She described herself as lost and lonely. Years later, in therapy, she learned that what she'd been feeling all along had a name. She had been grieving. Tom Manak felt it too, caring for his wife, Ro, through Parkinson's until she died in 2021. As the losses added up, he said, he felt less like her husband and more like her caregiver. What changed things for him was a Parkinson's support group at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, a circle of caregivers who stayed in touch and reminded each other they weren't alone. He kept meeting with them every week, even after Ro was gone. Both of them found the same thing: this role can't be sustained alone, and no one had told them that at the start. That's where Lamentations 3:22-23 meets the caregiver. Jeremiah wrote it while everything he loved fell apart, and still he said the Lord's mercies begin fresh each morning. The promise is for the one doing the caring too. You don't have to find strength for the whole long road tonight. You only need enough for today, and tomorrow the mercy will be new again. Bart speaks to this from his own life, caring for his wife through chronic pain, and from years of counseling people in the same place. The point is plain. Mercy often arrives through other people, and asking for help is part of loving someone well. The strongest thing you can do for them is to make sure you don't collapse. You were never meant to do it on willpower alone. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why caring for someone you love brings a grief that often goes unnamed * What two real caregivers learned about why the role can't be sustained alone * What Lamentations 3:22-23 promises the caregiver, and one step toward the support you need You can love someone with everything you have and still need help to keep going. His mercy is new every morning, and it's enough for today. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/253 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/253] 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

When You're Keeping a Secret You've Never Told Anyone

Most of us have at least one thing we've never said out loud, and we keep it because the secret feels safer buried. This episode looks at why hidden things grow in the dark, and how James 5:16 ties confession to the healing you've been needing. Almost everyone is keeping something. A thing they did, or a thing done to them, that they decided no one would ever hear about. It feels safer buried, and for a while it is. Nobody knows. The secret stays put. But secrets don't hold still. In the dark, they grow, and the longer they stay hidden, the more power they gather. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, found this out by accident. She set out to study human connection, what draws people close and what pulls them apart, and she kept running into something she couldn't name at first. It was shame. After interviewing hundreds of people, she landed on a line that's been quoted ever since: the less it gets talked about, the more it takes over. Shame feeds on secrecy. Left unspoken, it convinces the person holding it that they're the only one, and that if anyone found out, they'd no longer be worth knowing. That's the cruel part. The secret tells you everyone else has it together while you alone are broken, so you pull back to keep from being found out. And the pulling back costs you the closeness you were trying to protect. You end up alone with the very thing that made you feel alone. This shows up in relationships more than anywhere else. The thing left unsaid puts distance between two people who love each other, and they can feel the distance without being able to name it. A marriage can run for years on everything that never gets said, while both people wonder why they feel like strangers. James saw the same thing two thousand years before the research caught up. He gives a plain instruction: confess your sins to each other and pray for each other, so that you may be healed. Notice what he ties confession to. Healing. The thing you've kept hidden begins to lose its grip the moment you say it to someone who prays with you and stays. God built that mechanism into us long before a study confirmed it. Brown's research landed on the same cure. Shame, she found, cannot survive being spoken to someone who responds with empathy. The person who finally said the thing they'd never said, then watched the other person stay and listen, discovered the secret held less power than they had given it. In this episode, Bart draws on years of counseling, where much of what people bring to him traces back to a secret, especially in relationships. He connects what Brené Brown found to the words of James, and shows how to take the first step without making a spectacle of it. You don't need a crowd. You need one safe person and one sentence you've never said. Whatever you've been protecting has less power than you think, and saying it out loud is how you find that out. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * Why a buried secret gains power the longer it stays hidden * What Brené Brown's research revealed about how shame loses its hold * What James 5:16 promises when you bring a hidden thing into the light, and how to take the first step The secret was never as strong as it felt while you kept it to yourself. Healing starts with one sentence said to one person who stays. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/252 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/252] 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

Why You Keep Saying Yes When You Mean No

A lot of us say yes to almost everything, then resent the very people we said yes to. This episode looks at why we do it, and how telling the truth about your capacity frees both you and the people you love. Most of us don't set out to live overcommitted. We say yes to one good thing, then another, until the calendar is full and so is the resentment we can't quite name. We agree to the lunch and the favor a friend asked for, and the moment we hang up the phone we feel the cost of one more thing we didn't have room for. Most of us learned the habit young. Somewhere along the line, somebody taught us that no is rude, or a sign we're not committed enough to the people who count on us. So we keep the peace in the moment and pay for it later, in exhaustion and a slow burn of resentment. Anne Kennedy knew that feeling. She was a Christian woman doing everything a faithful Christian woman is supposed to do, and she still woke up at four in the morning unable to get ahead of her list. By bedtime she was apologizing again. As she put it, all she did was apologize for being a colossal failure. A friend at church nodded along and added her own version of the same list. Both of them were drowning in obligations they had agreed to, and neither one knew how to say no, because every last item looked like something a good Christian was supposed to say yes to. Then Anne came across a book that named what had happened to her. Her circle of obligation had grown so wide that life felt like ten thousand people stranded on the side of the road, and she was somehow supposed to be the good Samaritan to every one of them. What she finally saw was that her ordinary, daily obedience had been left lying by the road while she piled up one spiritual obligation after another. She had become an overcommitted Christian, and she could no longer tell the difference between what God asked of her and what guilt asked of her. This is where Matthew 5:37 meets us. Jesus said to let your yes be yes and your no be no, and that anything past that comes from somewhere it shouldn't. He treats yes and no as equally honest answers, which means a clear no is as faithful as a clear yes. A truthful no is an act of love. It protects your yes, and it protects the people on the other end from getting a worn-out, distracted version of you when they needed your attention. In this episode, Bart shares his own experience of saying yes to good things until the work God called him to began to suffer, and what he learned about telling a good thing no. Through Anne's story and the plain words of Jesus, the episode takes a clear-eyed look at why we keep agreeing when we mean to decline, and how to come back to the lighter yoke God offered. You were only ever asked to walk where He has already gone. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: - Why we keep saying yes when we mean no, and where that habit usually comes from - What Jesus meant in Matthew 5:37 when He put a clear no on equal footing with a clear yes - How a truthful no guards your time for the work God gave you, and protects the people you love Saying yes to everything was never the price of faithfulness. The lighter yoke is still on offer, and a clear no may be the most loving word you say all week. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/251 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/251] 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/b33aa395d1https://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

When Grief Doesn't End on Schedule

You can be managing for months and then fall apart in a grocery store. That's not falling behind. In this episode, discover what grief research and Psalm 147:3 both say about the pace God heals the brokenhearted. A woman walked into a grocery store three months after her father died. She wasn't falling apart. She'd been managing: gotten through the funeral and the paperwork, and gone back to work. She wasn't thinking about her dad when she walked through those doors. Then she turned down the coffee aisle and saw his brand on an endcap with a discount tag. The same brand he always bought. The one that smelled like his kitchen on winter mornings. She made it to the parking lot before she broke down. Keys still in her hand. Crying over a bag of coffee she had no reason to buy anymore. Her video went viral because thousands of people recognized what she was describing. Most of them had experienced something like it. Grief doesn't follow the timeline other people expect of it. You can be managing for months and then fall apart in a coffee aisle, and that's just grief doing what grief does. It takes as long as it takes, and it shows up when it shows up. Not long after my best friend died, I heard a joke that would have made him laugh. Before I knew what I was doing, I had my phone out and was dialing his number. My thumb knew what my brain hadn't caught up to yet. That's how grief works. The body responds before the mind catches up. Researchers at Columbia University who study bereavement have found that the brain of a grieving person is constantly, involuntarily scanning its surroundings for the person who died. When it finds a match, a familiar smell or brand or song, the body reacts before the conscious mind catches up. The grief feels physical because it is. Your nervous system is still looking. Psalm 147:3 says God heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds. Both verbs are present tense. Ongoing. He's doing it now, at the pace grief moves in a human life. The word translated "brokenhearted" in the Hebrew means shattered, and God draws close to the shattered. The closeness comes first. The healing follows. Through the woman's story and Psalm 147:3, this episode speaks directly to the person who feels like they should be further along by now. You're allowed to be where you are. God is not impatient with the process. BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: * What Columbia University's grief research reveals about why the body reacts to loss months after the fact, and why that response makes sense * What the Hebrew word behind "brokenhearted" in Psalm 147:3 tells us about the kind of person God draws close to * One concrete thing you can do today when grief shows up unexpectedly Grief is what love looks like when the person is gone. God heals the brokenhearted at the pace grief moves. He stays. Share This Episode: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/250 [https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/250] 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://daily-devotions-for-busy-lives.kit.com/b33aa395d1]. 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