Are you worried? While we may not want to acknowledge it, most of us spend time throughout the day worrying. Our calendars are full, and we need more time. Our bank accounts are low, and there are bills to pay. Life is hectic. Worry seems to invade our thoughts, so the Bible has encouragement for these times.
Jesus says, “So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need” (Matthew 6:31-33).
“Don’t worry,” Jesus encourages. As he says this, he points to the birds and flowers. Neither worry, yet the Lord meets their needs. If nature’s needs are met, how much more will the Lord take care of us?
Friend, Jesus’ words are true. Worry will always try to invade our thoughts, but faith can be our defense. God invites you to trade your worry for his peace.
So when anxiety rises, pause and look outside. See the birds. Notice the flowers. Let creation preach to you: “If God cares for them, he cares for me too.”
Labor Day has a way of sneaking up on us. One minute, we’re enjoying the long days of summer, and the next, the calendar says September. The first Monday of the month is here, pools are getting ready to close, kids are back in school, and we’re beginning to settle into the rhythm of fall.
For many of us, Labor Day means a cookout, a family gathering, or maybe one last trip to the lake before summer slips away, but the day is about more than a long weekend. It’s a day set aside to recognize the value of work, and the Bible has quite a bit to say about work.
From the very beginning, God gave Adam work to do. He placed him in the garden “to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). Work was part of God’s design, which means the work you do matters. Maybe you spend your days in an office. Maybe you work in a classroom, a kitchen, a field, or a workshop. Maybe your work happens mostly at home. Maybe you care for someone else, do things nobody notices, or carry responsibilities that never seem to end. Whatever your work looks like, God sees it, and when we do our work faithfully, we have an opportunity to serve others and reflect the character of God.
But there’s another lesson tucked into Labor Day that is often overlooked.
We were made to rest, too.
God worked during creation, and then He rested on the seventh day. Not because He was tired, but because He was showing us something we desperately need to remember.
Rest matters.
Rest isn’t laziness.
Rest isn’t wasted time.
Rest is a gift from God.
Sometimes we get so caught up in what we’re doing that we begin to believe our value is tied to our productivity. We think we have to accomplish more, work harder, or keep going just a little longer to prove our worth.
But God never said that.
Your worth doesn’t come from what you accomplish.
Your worth comes from him.
Perhaps you need that reminder today. Maybe you’ve been carrying a heavy load. Maybe you’re tired from the demands of work, family, or life. Maybe you’ve been running at full speed for so long that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to slow down. If so, Jesus offers an invitation.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” Jesus says in Matthew 11:28.
What a beautiful promise.
So today, enjoy the holiday. Grill something. Spend time with family. Take a walk. Sit outside. Enjoy one of the last long days of summer, and take a moment to thank God for the work he has given you. Thank him for the opportunity to make a difference, even when your work feels ordinary or unnoticed.
But don’t forget to rest.
Because sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is stop, take a breath, and remember that God is still in control.
Work with all your heart, as if you’re working for the Lord. And rest with the same confidence, knowing that your worth has never depended on how much you accomplish.
Your work matters.
And your rest matters, too.
Happy Labor Day! May your day be filled with gratitude, peace, and the joy of knowing that God sees your work, values your faithfulness, and invites you to rest in him.
Is our neighbor really valued by God? It can be easy to accept our own value to the Lord, but what about our neighbor’s value? It’s a little harder when the person standing in front of us is the person who frustrates us.
The person who gets under our skin.
The person who looks different from us.
The person whose opinions make us angry.
The person who has made a mess of their life.
The person we would rather avoid than understand.
However, if we truly believe that we are God’s children, that truth should change more than the way we see ourselves. It should change the way we see other people.
1 John 3:1 says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”
Dwell there for a moment.
The same God who calls you His child also loves the person who frustrates you.
The same God who sees your worth sees theirs.
The same God who offers you grace offers them grace.
The same God who looks beyond your mistakes and failures is willing to look beyond theirs.
That doesn’t mean we have to agree with everyone. It doesn’t mean we excuse harmful behavior or ignore injustice. But it does mean we should be careful about reducing people to their worst moment, their appearance, their mistakes, their politics, their circumstances, or the ways they are different from us.
Before they are anything else, they are someone God created and loves.
And perhaps that is one of the greatest challenges of knowing we are God’s children: learning to look at others as if they are priceless.
What if the person who annoys you today is someone God is inviting you to see differently?
What if the person you’ve written off needs the same grace you have received?
What if, instead of asking, “Why are they like that?” we started asking, “How can I love them?”
Being a child of God isn’t just about knowing where we belong.
It’s about learning to treat the people around us like they matter to our Father, too.
Pip: Some days arrive with more questions than answers — which, honestly, describes most Tuesdays. Chris Miller's recent writing at Get Encouraged leans straight into that feeling.
Mara: It does. We're covering two stretches of territory today: what it looks like to trust God when life gets hard, and what the Bible actually says about who you are — grace, identity, and forgiveness.
Pip: Let's start with the trust question, because that's where the ground gets unsteady.
Holding On When the Road Gets Hard
Mara: The animating question here is simple but serious: when life keeps throwing difficulty at you, what do you actually hold onto?
Pip: The anchor post goes straight to Romans 8, and the claim is sweeping. Here's the line: "nothing — not death, life, angels, demons, our fears today, our worries about tomorrow, or anything else in all creation — can separate us from the love of God revealed in Christ Jesus."
Mara: That's the spine of the piece. The argument is that God's love isn't conditional on circumstances improving — the diagnosis, the lost job, the relationship that fell apart, none of it moves the needle on that love.
Pip: Which is a remarkable thing to say to someone in the middle of a hard season, rather than after it.
Mara: Exactly. And the post on Joseph's story in Genesis fills that out with a long example. Joseph gets sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused, thrown in prison — and the piece quotes Genesis 50:20 directly: "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives."
Pip: So the prison wasn't a detour. It was the road.
Mara: That's precisely how the post frames it. The piece on Jeremiah 33:3 makes a related move — God's invitation in hard times isn't "figure it out," it's "call to me and I will answer you." The recipe is simple, even when the situation isn't.
Pip: And then there's the root metaphor — a neighbor's evergreen toppled by wind because the root system was too shallow. Strengthening Your Faith Roots in Tough Times uses Colossians 2 to argue that deep roots in Scripture and prayer are what hold when the storms arrive.
Mara: Trusting God's Promises When Life Gets Hard and Embracing Change both reinforce that. One anchors on Psalm 12:6 — God's promises are pure, refined like silver. The other lands on Hebrews 13:8: Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The stability is in the person, not the circumstances.
Pip: So the through-line is: you can't control the wind, but you can decide how deep the roots go.
Mara: That's it. And that question of who you are underneath the hard seasons connects directly to the next territory — identity and grace.
Who You Are Has Already Been Decided
Pip: This segment is really asking one question: where does your worth actually come from, and does it move when your circumstances do?
Mara: Your Worth: More Than Achievements goes at that directly. The setup is that we live in a world constantly measuring by accomplishment, but the Bible asks something different. Here's the line from 1 John 3:1: "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!"
Pip: So the status isn't earned — it's given. John doesn't say you might become a child of God if you work hard enough.
Mara: Right. The post makes that explicit: your worth isn't your résumé, your reputation, or the number of people who approve of you. Identity is rooted in belonging, not in performance. Children don't earn their place in a family — they belong because they're family.
Pip: That's a genuinely different accounting system than most people are running.
Mara: It is. And You're Priceless: Understanding God's Grace pushes that further — the title itself is the thesis. Grace means the value was assigned before you did anything to deserve it.
Pip: Which makes the self-forgiveness question almost inevitable. If the value doesn't depend on your record, then carrying guilt for a record God has already addressed is — well, it's working from the wrong ledger.
Mara: Have You Forgiven Yourself? sits right there. The logic that runs through all three posts is consistent: your identity in God doesn't fluctuate with your failures, so the invitation is to actually receive what's already been given.
Pip: The priceless tag isn't aspirational. It's already true.
Mara: And that's worth sitting with — because the hard seasons covered earlier look different when you're not also carrying the weight of feeling like you have to earn your way back.
Pip: Deep roots, unshakeable love, an identity that doesn't depend on the scoreboard — that's the territory.
Mara: Next time, we'll see what else is growing at Get Encouraged. Stay with it.
Sometimes, the difference between complaining and giving thanks isn’t what happened to us. It’s what we choose to see. A glass can be half empty or half full. The circumstances haven’t changed. Only our perspective has.
Paul tells us in Colossians 2:7 that when our lives are rooted in Christ, we will “overflow with thankfulness.”
Overflow.
That’s an interesting word.
Paul doesn’t say we’ll occasionally find something to be thankful for. He says thankfulness can overflow from our lives, but how do we overflow with thankfulness when life isn’t going the way we hoped?
We learn to look for the blessings.
There was an old Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown feeds Snoopy on Thanksgiving Day. Snoopy looks at his bowl of ordinary dog food and thinks about everyone else enjoying a Thanksgiving feast.
Then he reminds himself, “At least I’m not the turkey.”
Even Snoopy found something to be thankful for!
Sometimes we have to look a little harder to find our reasons for gratitude.
Remember the tree that fell in our neighbor’s yard?
It was certainly unexpected. A large evergreen tree came crashing down during a windy day.
But thankfully, it landed almost perfectly. It fell across our neighbor’s yard and into ours, and the only thing it hit was an old, ugly bush at the corner of our yard.
We had been wanting that bush removed.
The tree took care of it.
One less thing on the to-do list!
The fallen tree didn’t change.
The circumstances didn’t change.
But our perspective changed.
And sometimes that’s what thankfulness does.
It doesn’t necessarily change our circumstances, but it changes the way we see them.
There will be days when the wind is blowing, the plans aren’t working, and life feels more like a storm than a sunny afternoon.
On those days, don’t overlook the blessings because you’re focused on the problems.
Look around…
Look for God’s goodness.
Look for his faithfulness.
Look for the little things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
And then give thanks.
There is always a reason to be thankful.
Today, challenge yourself to find three things—big or small—that you can thank God for.
You might be surprised how quickly your list grows.
And as you look for reasons to be thankful, you may discover that thankfulness isn’t just something you do.
Those were the words I heard from the next room while I was standing at the kitchen sink.
It was a beautiful, sunny, but windy day. The sun was streaming through the window, and I could hear the wind blowing outside. For a moment, the noise level increased. I assumed it was just another strong gust, so I kept washing dishes.
Then came the announcement: “The tree fell!”
A seemingly healthy evergreen tree in our neighbor’s yard had been toppled by the wind.
The problem wasn’t the wind. The problem was the tree’s roots.
Its root system was too weak to withstand the force of the wind.
Paul gives us a similar picture of our faith in Colossians 2:6-7:
“And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots grow down into him and let your lives be built on him, then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught and you will overflow with thankfulness.”
Life is going to bring some strong winds. Sometimes they come as unexpected problems. Sometimes they come through disappointment, loss, uncertainty, or change. And sometimes the winds of life seem to come out of nowhere. We can’t always control the wind, but we can decide how deeply we are rooted.
A tree with deep roots is much less likely to be toppled by a strong wind. In the same way, a faith deeply rooted in Christ and grounded in God’s Word gives us something to hold on to when the storms of life arrive.
So how do we strengthen our roots? Here are 4 suggestions.
Spend time in God’s Word. Make this a daily practice.
Spend time in prayer.
Remind ourselves of God’s faithfulness. Make a list of the times God has been faithful in keeping promises to you.
Cultivate an attitude of thankfulness. Make a list of the reasons you have to be thankful.
The winds of life will blow. We can’t always prevent the storms or control what happens around us, but we can make sure our roots are growing deep into Christ.
So today, spend some time fertilizing your faith’s root system.
Open God’s Word. Pray. Remember His faithfulness. Look for His blessings.
And give thanks.
Because when the winds blow, deep roots make all the difference.
What if God has already given you the recipe for getting through the hardest days of your life?
Every good chef knows that a recipe is meant to be followed. When a dish is complicated, you don’t just throw ingredients into a bowl and hope for the best. You follow the instructions.
Life can be pretty complicated, too. There are days when we don’t know what to do next, where to turn, or how we’re going to make it through. In Jeremiah 33:3, God gives us a simple recipe for these times.
“Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”
The recipe for navigating the complications of life is simple:
CALL ON THE LORD.
“Call to me,” the Lord invites when we are tired and weary.
“Call to me,” he invites when we don’t know how we’re going to make it through the day.
“Call to me,” he invites when we need wisdom and don’t know which way to turn.
Notice what God doesn’t say: Figure it out on your own.
He says, “Call to me.”
Whatever the situation, wherever we find ourselves, the invitation remains.
And so does the promise: “I will answer you.”
We may not always get the answer we expect. We may not understand what God is doing, but we can trust that when we call, he hears us.
When life feels complicated, we don’t have to have all the answers. We simply need to know who to call. CALL ON THE LORD. That’s the recipe for making it through whatever life puts on our plate.
Thanks for reading. Please share this post with someone who may need the reminder today.
Has adversity ever caused you to feel as if you’re climbing uphill? Adversity is certainly not welcomed in anyone’s life, but it finds its way into all of our lives. No matter how hard we try to avoid it, there are seasons when we simply have to climb uphill.
Joseph knew all about uphill climbs. The Bible tells his story in Genesis 38–50, and it is a story filled with betrayal, injustice, disappointment, and hardship.
Joseph was loved by his father, but his brothers grew to hate him. Joseph was his father’s favored son, and his brothers resented him for it. When they had the opportunity, they sold Joseph into slavery. Joseph was taken to Egypt and placed in Potiphar’s household. Joseph may have thought that was the end of his story, but it wasn’t.
Even there, God was with him. Joseph worked hard, and the Lord blessed what he did. Eventually, Joseph was put in charge of Potiphar’s entire household.
Then adversity struck again. Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph. Joseph refused her advances, and when she tried to force herself on him, he ran away. Angry and humiliated, she falsely accused Joseph of attacking her. Joseph was innocent, but he was sent to prison anyway.
Can you relate to Joseph? Have you ever had something go wrong even when you were doing the right thing?
But prison wasn’t the end of Joseph’s story. While there, Joseph interpreted dreams for two of Pharaoh’s officials. Eventually, one of those men remembered Joseph and told Pharaoh about him. Joseph was brought before Pharaoh to interpret a troubling dream.
Joseph explained that Egypt was about to experience seven years of abundance followed by seven years of devastating famine. He advised Pharaoh to prepare during the years of plenty.
Pharaoh was so impressed with Joseph that he put him in charge of the entire operation. The young man who had been sold into slavery became one of the most powerful men in Egypt, and eventually, the very brothers who had sold him into slavery came before him looking for food.
Joseph had every reason to seek revenge. Instead, he offered forgiveness. After their father died, Joseph’s brothers were afraid he would finally punish them for what they had done. He didn’t. Joseph understood something they didn’t.
He understood that God had been at work all along. Joseph told them in Genesis 50:20, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
What an incredible perspective.
Joseph didn’t say what his brothers did was good. It wasn’t.
Being sold into slavery wasn’t good. Being falsely accused wasn’t good. Being thrown into prison wasn’t good.
But God was able to take all of those bad things and use them for good.
It has been said that the iron chains around Joseph’s hands and feet eventually led to the gold chain around his neck in Pharaoh’s palace.
The prison wasn’t a detour from God’s plan. It was part of the journey.
Joseph got to Egypt because his brothers sold him into slavery. He got into Pharaoh’s presence because of his time in prison. And he was positioned to save countless lives because God had been preparing him through every difficult chapter.
We will face adversity in our lives. That’s inevitable.
There will be moments when we wonder why God allowed something to happen. We may not understand what He is doing, and we certainly may not see how our circumstances could possibly work for good.
But Joseph’s story reminds us that God can be working even when we can’t see what He’s doing.
Your difficult season may not make sense today.
Keep trusting Him.
The setback may become the setup.
The prison may become the pathway.
The adversity may become part of the story God is writing.
You don’t have to understand every step to trust the one who is leading you.
How has God brought you through adversity in the past?
Thanks for reading. If this encouraged you today, please share it with someone who may need the reminder that God is still at work—even in the difficult seasons.
Some days seem to come with more questions than answers. Some seasons seem to bring one struggle after another. Just when we think we’ve made it around one corner, another challenge is waiting for us. Life can be hard, but we don’t have to face it alone.
The Bible promises us that the Lord will never leave us or forsake us. And Romans 8 gives us an even greater assurance. Paul reminds us that nothing—not death, life, angels, demons, our fears today, our worries about tomorrow, or anything else in all creation—can separate us from the love of God revealed in Christ Jesus.
Think about that for a moment.
Nothing can separate you from His love.
Not the diagnosis you didn’t expect.
Not the phone call you didn’t want to receive.
Not the relationship that fell apart.
Not the job you lost.
Not the mistake you wish you could undo.
Not the uncertainty about what tomorrow will bring.
God’s love doesn’t disappear when life gets difficult.
In the healing and the hurting of life, Jesus is there. In the celebrations and the disappointments, Jesus is there. In the answered prayers and the prayers that seem to go unanswered, Jesus is there. In the moments when our faith feels strong and the moments when we’re struggling to hold on, Jesus is there. In every moment and every minute, Jesus is there. In every twist and every turn, Jesus is there.
We may not always understand what God is doing. We may not always see where the road is leading, but we can know who walks the road with us.
He doesn’t leave us. He doesn’t forsake us. He doesn’t let go of us.
Whatever today holds, you don’t have to face it alone.
Get Encouraged 