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Draw near: Praying for hope

Lynne Baab • Tuesday May 2 2023

“Hope is optimism with a broken heart.” —Nick Cave, Australian singer, songwriter, screenwriter, and occasional actor inFaith, Hope and Carnage, co-authored with Sean O’Hagan. [1]

I have written before about the toxic optimism I was raised with, an optimism that makes no room for emotions of sadness, anger, and fear. As a result of the tension between my own intense emotions and an atmosphere that negated them, I have struggled my whole life to figure out what exactly God desires related to a positive outlook, optimism, and hope.

I resonated with Nick Cave’s perception that hope is connected to both optimism and a broken...

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Draw near: Praying to act like a friend

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 25 2023

Six years ago, I won an award for an article arguing that to be a neighbor we need to nurture our listening skills. (That’s the only time I’ve won an award for an article. It was a cool moment.) Here’s the opening to the article:

Many years ago, I heard a sermon on the prodigal son. “Who is my neighbor?” the teacher of the law asks Jesus (Luke 10:29). In response, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. At the end of the story, Jesus asks, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands...

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Draw Near: Praying to love our limits

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 18 2023

Take a look at this cool book title: You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News. I truly love that title, which seems increasingly relevant as I get older and experience the limitations (and even humiliations) of aging. The author is Kelly M. Kapic, a professor of theology at Covenant College, who has written numerous books. This latest book, with the title I find captivating, was published in 2022.

In an interview in Christianity Today, Dr. Kapic mentions the gap between our high expectations of ourselves and the limits we live with. He says this gap probably comes...

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Draw near: Praying about friendship and freedom

Lynne Baab • Wednesday April 12 2023

A group of people called Proto-Indo-Europeans lived north of the Caspian and Black Seas between 4500 and 2500 B.C. Linguists hypothesize they had a unified language with a verb meaning “to love or please.” Over centuries, those people moved west into what is now Germany, Scandinavia, and England. The word meaning “to love or please” morphed into two different nouns, one meaning “lover, friend” and the other “beloved, not in bondage.” Both words had the same beginning letters, but the former had “nd” at the end. Later, in Old English, these words became “frēond” and “frēo.” In recent centuries these words...

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