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“Hello, God” Final Preview – Micah 7

Good Morning, Blogging Family! Thank you so much for following this series of previews from Hello, God. I hope they have been encouraging to you! Today’s clip was inspired by the application section from two chapters that look at the parable of the Prodigal Son and examine how our relationships with others are often a litmus test for how closely we are walking with the Lord.

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USE IT OR LOSE IT:

  1. Have you ever been tempted to react like the angry older brother in Jesus’s story? Why or why not? 
  2. Micah 7:18-19 is a beautiful picture of how God forgives us. In the days that followed, God helped me to pray it for each one of the people I needed to forgive, thanking God that He was willing to forgive them and asking Him to help me offer them the same no-strings-attached forgiveness that I’d received.  Depending on your own situation, use the following verses as prayer inspiration for yourself or someone else:

“Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
    and passing over transgression
    for the remnant of his inheritance?
He does not retain his anger forever,
    because he delights in steadfast love.
He will again have compassion on us;
    he will tread our iniquities underfoot.
You will cast all our sins
    into the depths of the sea.”

3.  Many of us will identify with elements of both the Lost Son and the Angry Older Brother, which is why I believe Jesus includes both characters in His story. No matter which character you identified with the most at the outset of this study, be open to what the Lord may be trying to show you as you return to the story prayerfully over a period of time. Asking God open-ended questions like, “Which character am I?” and not setting parameters on His answers is another step in growing in your conversations together. 

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Shepherd Press is offering a discount on pre-orders of Hello, God, Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short until 5/31. https://www.shepherdpress.com/products/hello-god/. Use code “HELLO” to get 25% off! 

Posted on by graceutomo12

“Hello, God” Preview 4 of 5 – The Lord’s Prayer

Good Morning, Blogging Family! This clip is inspired by the first of two chapters near the end of Hello, God that look at the Lord’s Prayer and suggest ways to apply it to your prayer life. Stay tuned for the conclusion of our preview series – a meditation on Micah 7 – tomorrow!

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“‘Lord, teach us to pray.’ The disciples’ request would sound reverent, childlike—but they don’t stop there. They tack on an earthly comparison reminding their Messiah, eternal God dressed in human flesh, that they haven’t fully grasped his identity yet. ‘Teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples‘ (Luke 11: 1).

How does Jesus respond to his disciples’ misplaced modifier? There are plenty of instances where He does reprove his followers’ fixation with human tradition, but in this case He graciously ignores the slight and addresses the crux of their question: how to connect intimately with God. 

When we look at the opening lines of Jesus’s teaching prayer (commonly known as the Lord’s Prayer) in Luke 11:2, several simple, yet startling, truths arrest our attention.     

“Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread…”

First, Jesus’s prayer transforms the intimidating Judge of the Old Testament into “Father.” While He’s still instructing His disciples (and us) to pray for God’s name to be lifted high and revered, He personalizes the Creator and gives us a direct access to Him that John’s disciples could never have imagined. 

Next, Jesus’s teaching prayer undermines everything His disciples thought they knew about God’s kingdom. In Jesus’s day, most Jewish people thought the Messiah would emancipate their nation from the Roman empire. But the prayer Jesus teaches His disciples, unlike their cultural preconceptions, doesn’t put a time stamp on God’s kingdom arriving on earth. That’s because He wants them to realize God’s kingdom is first and foremost a spiritual one, made up of sons and daughters bought back from eternal destruction. God’s kingdom was coming in their day, and it is still coming in ours.

Finally, Jesus adds something deeply personal and unlike the rote prayers His disciples likely learned as children. He adds requests for daily, material provision. The sketches of God they would have glimpsed in the synagogue might have emphasized His jealousy for the glory of His name. Or His promise to deliver Israel, if the nation humbled itself enough. But the Father Jesus paints in His teaching prayer is also deeply concerned for whether they—uneducated “nobodies” from a disreputable district in Israel—have food on the table…

USE IT OR LOSE IT:

  1. Have you previously considered Jesus’s prayer as a rote recipe to recite at church or school, or as a living model to help you grow your own prayer life? Has today broadened your perspective? Why or why not?
  2. Jesus paints with broad strokes in His teaching prayer, graciously giving us plenty of liberty to color in our own unique details. Take each of first three lines and try to come up with your own version. For example: 

‘God, thank You that You love me so much more perfectly than any earthly parent.  I praise You for how wise You are, how powerful, how mighty—how You delight to show unfailing love and mercy to me, even though I don’t deserve it. Lord, please bring Your kingdom quickly to this broken world! I see sickness and sin and injustice all around me, and people turning to all sorts of things they believe are going to fix them. But I know that what they really need is the transforming message of Your Good News. Father, thank You so much that You care about the tiny practical details of my life, and want me to ask You for what I need…‘”

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Shepherd Press is offering a discount on pre-orders of Hello, God, Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short until 5/31. https://www.shepherdpress.com/products/hello-god/. Use code “HELLO” to get 25% off! 

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“Hello, God” Preview 3 of 5 – Psalm 138

Good Morning, Blogging Family! This video is inspired by a chapter from Hello, God that looks at one of my favorite psalms, 138, and shares how God has used that passage over the years to strengthen me when I felt like I couldn’t make it through another day. Stay tuned for an excerpt from Lord’s Prayer tomorrow!

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“During the years that I battled uncontrolled seizures, I also developed intractable migraines. Doctors hypothesized that each seizure would trigger a migraine as an after-effect. Since I rarely went a day without a seizure, I always had a migraine. Once it became clear that these conditions were linked and there was unlikely to be a pharmaceutical solution to either, my access to pain medication was restricted and I was told to endure the migraines naturally…

…God continued sending psalms to my rescue. David, with his deep brokenness and reckless dependence on God’s grace, has a signature tendency to offer God raw praise in the midst of unimaginable pain. (Try being accused of insanity [Psalm 34], or being hunted down by your own son [Psalm 3]!) For me, these raw praises were the most contagious because they gave me permission to flip-flop between praising God in one breath and crying out to Him from the depths of my soul in the next. 

Psalm 138 is a classic flip-flopping psalm. David opens with a raucous chorus, rejoicing in God’s faithfulness both to him personally (v. 3) and to the righteous in general (vv. 5-6). It’s easy to imagine him leading worship in the sanctuary, hands raised high in adoration. 

But, then, we hit verses 7-8 and discover that’s not the psalm’s setting at all. David’s not leading worship. He describes himself as “[walking] in the midst of troubles,” surrounded by angry enemies. How was he just able to write such a flattering portrayal of God only a few verses before? 

David can still praise God because he doesn’t believe God will leave him where he is. He takes hold of those characteristics that he mentioned at the beginning, characteristics God has demonstrated throughout his life and Israel’s history, characteristics such as faithfulness and lovingkindness.  He preaches those traits to himself.  If God is who David has known Him to be, and is eternal and unchanging, then David can trust that deliverance is on the way:

“Though I walk in the midst of trouble,
    you preserve my life;
you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies,
    and your right hand delivers me.
The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me;
    your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever.”

            Psalm 138 reminded me of two truths on those mornings when I didn’t think I had it in me to make it through the next hour, much less the rest of the day:

 1) God, not I, would fulfill His plan for me that day. David could have put the unrealistic pressure on himself that he must somehow make sense of his trial and discover some higher purpose. But he doesn’t do that. He humbly admits that whatever spiritual growth or transformation is going to take place will be completely the Lord’s doing. 

2) Nothing I did or did not do that day could change God’s heart toward me. It’s tempting to think we can earn or lose brownie points in God’s Book of Suffering by how well we manage our pain, tend to our responsibilities, marshal what meager resources we have left, etc. But that only adds distress and sells the lie that our right standing with God depends on something other than Christ’s work on the cross. Remember there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus! (Romans 8:1) Jesus has already lived the perfect life on our behalf and we can be completely at rest, dressed in His gorgeous, blood-bought robes of righteousness…”

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Shepherd Press is offering a discount on pre-orders of Hello, God, Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short until 5/31. https://www.shepherdpress.com/products/hello-god/. Use code “HELLO” to get 25% off! 

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“Hello, God” Preview 2 of 5 – Psalm 16

Good Morning, Blogging Family! Thanks so much for checking out these previews of Hello, God. This audio clip is inspired by a chapter that shares more about my own journey of re-learning how to pray, including an entry from my prayer journal. Stay tuned for Psalm 138 tomorrow!

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“A few weeks after my hospital discharge in January 2017, someone suggested using the Psalms as a template to improve my prayer life. The idea sounded vaguely familiar, but I don’t remember having tested it out before. Perhaps my previously high success rate against life’s previously humdrum obstacles had made heart-to-hearts with the God of the universe seem superfluous. 

Until God saw fit to remove both my cherished successes and my easily surmountable obstacles in the blink of an eye. Now my injured brain pinned me so far below the baseline of a “normal” prayer life that improvising off a psalm sounded like the stuff of theologians or Christian heavyweights from centuries past. 

So I didn’t. 

Instead, I looked for a psalm that represented my current spiritual or emotional state and read it to God, saying, “Lord, this is from me to You.” I did this day after day, for weeks on end. God kindly embraced my meagre offerings. He knew that my heart’s desire was to move from my rote “Thank you for this food,” or “Please help my legs to stop hurting” prayers to something more relational, even if my injured brain couldn’t figure out how to get there just yet. 

Psalm 16 is one of the earliest psalms I remember finding my own words for. I’ve included my own journal entry here as encouragement for you as you begin talking to God from your heart…

Lord, You are my only hope. When I’m afraid, I put my trust in You.

My self-righteousness is a capsized mole hill to Your Mount Everest. Your chosen ones are my most precious companions.

My sorrows balloon like a mushroom cloud when I’m stalking fairness, friendship, or intimacy at your expense. My jaws lock shut before I can sample the rancid sweetness of my stolen meat.

Yet my cup bubbles over with Your peerless, life-changing water. Oh, give me a taste for eternity! Teach me to delight myself in the hope of Your priceless inheritance.

Thank You for the still, small voice that whispers truth and love in the wee hours of the morning. Please help me surrender to this bit, this bridle that is turned by the God Who Sees. O loving Father, lock my wandering eyes on Your patient, faithful smile! Nothing can touch me with You at my side…”

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Shepherd Press is offering a discount on pre-orders of Hello, God, Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short until 5/31. https://www.shepherdpress.com/products/hello-god/. Use code “HELLO” to get 25% off! 

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“Hello, God” Preview 1 of 5 – Psalm 1

Hello, Blogging Family! Today is Day 1 of the 5-part social media series previewing Hello, God that I mentioned in my last post. The social media videos are quite short, so I wanted to share longer excerpts of the chapters that inspired the clips here as a special “thank you” for your prayers and support over the years. Stay tuned for Psalm 16 tomorrow!

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“So you’ve said, ‘Hello, God.’ What now? You probably noticed at a young age that a conversation requires two-way communication in order to be healthy. This kind of healthy conversation often takes place between people who know something about each other and are interested in learning more.

God knows the tiniest details about us, His creatures, but we can’t begin to comprehend a miniscule part of Him, our Creator.  1 Timothy 6:16 says God “alone has immortality, [He] dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.”

Mercifully, God took the initiative to remedy this conversational inequality by speaking to us first. A lot. He’s given us sixty-six books’ worth of direct revelation, not counting dreams, visions, and miracles not preserved in the Bible.

How can we possibly respond to that? 

As our Creator, God knows our limitations and “remembers we are dust“(Psalm 103:14). He’s not expecting a sixty-six-book-long answer to His extravagant overtures…

That’s why the Psalms are so powerful. They are 150 Hebrew poems that depict people calling out to God in all kinds of situations. There are psalms of praise and psalms of grief, psalms that run to God in anxiety and others that beg deliverance from depression. We know these emotional expressions glorify God and submit to Him perfectly because they are included in His Holy Word!

The Psalms became a lifeline for me when I was relearning how to pray after my hospital discharge. The brain injury meant I could barely form a complete sentence in my head if I wasn’t speaking aloud—and forget about closing my eyes. I decided to choose a psalm and read it aloud, telling God it was my prayer as well as the psalmist’s. A few weeks later, I took to writing the psalm out in my own words. Soon someone gave me a prayer journal. 

About a year later, I tried praying “off the cuff.” It was weird. I felt like a heretic, shedding all my church-y lingo for weekday vocabulary, talking to God as if He were sitting right next to me on our oversized sleeper sofa. But Jesus has called us His friends. He wants us to talk to Him that way (John 15:13-15)…

 USE IT OR LOSE IT:

  1. Read through Psalm 1. What does it tell you about God? Yourself?
  2. Note anything that stood out to you for the first time, or struck you in a different way. Tell God what you noticed and how it’s affecting you (good or bad). 
  3. Pray through Psalm 1 or write it out in your own words. For example:

‘Dear God, I want to trust You when You tell me that I’ll only be truly happy when I’m spending time in Your Word and thinking about You throughout the day. I don’t want to be influenced by people who don’t obey You or who tempt me to run after worldly priorities. Please fill me with Your Holy Spirit and give me a love for Your Word and the things that please You…‘”

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Shepherd Press is offering a discount on pre-orders of Hello, God, Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short until 5/31. https://www.shepherdpress.com/products/hello-god/. Use code “HELLO” to get 25% off! 

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“Hello, God” Release Date and Intro

Hello, Blogging Family! Thank you so much for helping us choose the cover of Hello, God, a couple of weeks ago! Thanks to you, we decided to go with the sunrise painting. We appreciate your support so much, and are so excited that the book is finally coming out on May 25th!

I’ve also been collaborating with our team at Shepherd Press to develop some short videos for Instagram (@walkingwitgrace) and Facebook that share our heart for the book and preview some of its content. The video above is an updated introduction since it’s been a while since we first announced Hello, God last summer. We’ll also be posting a 5-day devotional series that runs Monday-Friday of next week. That being said, I’m aware that not all of you are on social media, so I’ll be sharing the series here as well. We’d love for you to join us!

Here’s an additional preview of the book’s back cover:

“Is there a “right” way to talk to God? How does God speak to us? Does every prayer get answered? What do I do while waiting? Whether you’re new to the Christian faith or have been praying for decades, these questions don’t always have easy answers. In this 31-day devotional, Grace Utomo explores key Bible passages and characters that helped her learn to pray again after severe trauma. Discover God’s heart to commune personally with each of His children in a month-long journey that starts at Creation and carries you to the cross – and beyond.”

Thank you so much for your support with our first book, Walking with Grace. Whether the idea of Hello, God is something that speaks to you personally, or sounds like it might be a good resource for someone you know, I hope it will bless you in some way. I never thought I would have to relearn how to pray as someone who’s been a believer for most of my life, but this journey ultimately strengthened my walk with the Lord, and gave me a deeper point of reference for engaging with people who were either new to the faith, or were struggling for some other reason. None of that would have been possible if I had not had to “start from square one” again. And for that, I am deeply grateful.

Thanks as always for your love and support over the years!

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Shepherd Press is offering a discount on pre-orders of Hello, God, Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short until 5/31. https://www.shepherdpress.com/products/hello-god/. Use code “HELLO” to get 25% off! 

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Violin Update: Amazing Grace Reprise

Good morning, Blogging Family! It’s been a while since I posted about violin, so I’m excited to share this update with you. Yesterday Ivan and I had the amazing privilege of visiting Classical Conversations, a homeschooling community that meets at Hillside Church. I got to give a 30 min. talk on the history of violin, and also share a little bit about my own violin journey both as a young person and after my accident.

This opportunity was near and dear to my heart since I was homeschooled all the way until college. The kids were such enthusiastic listeners, and made my job easy by asking plenty of creative questions. Such a testimony to their parents’ faithfulness, not just with educating them but also raising them up to know the Lord!

We ended our talk by playing “10,000 Reasons” and “Amazing Grace,” and I wanted to share this clip from “Amazing Grace” with you all. That was one of the pieces I played in my Facebook Live recital last year, but I’m thankful that God has allowed me to keep working on it and add some more notes and rhythms since then.

Thanks as always for your prayers and support!

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Preparing for Easter: the Lord’s Prayer for Us

Good evening, Blogging Family! As we prepare our hearts for Easter, I wanted to share a brief excerpt from our forthcoming book, Hello, God: Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short. I pray it will encourage you!

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Mere hours before He would face the abject humiliation of a kangaroo court and the unbridled rage of a rightfully outraged, holy God, Jesus offered specific, personal intercession for you and me. What does He ask for in these final, crucial moments? 

“I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth… I do not ask for these [the disciples] only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:15-21; emphasis mine)

As He does in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus highlights how much we need God’s protection from Satan’s wily schemes. Although Jesus is mere hours away from breaking the power of sin and death, He knows that, until our own deaths or His Second Coming, the remnants of our sin nature will still be vulnerable to temptation and spiritual attack (Romans 7:18-25). 

Next, He emphasizes the centrality of God’s Word in our ongoing spiritual transformation. For His disciples, that would mean preserving Jesus’s teachings in the four Gospels and adding several epistles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, in addition to continuing to study and apply the Jewish Old Testament. For us, this portion of Jesus’s prayer means reading and applying all sixty-six books of the Bible without favoritism, trusting that every part of God’s Word is useful for “teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). 

It should hardly come as a surprise that the Savior of the world closes His prayer for us with a plea for our unity. Whether or not we’re right with others is an excellent test of whether or not we’re right with God. While only God can truly know the state of our hearts, Scripture is full of passages admonishing us that our faith will be proved by the fruit we bear (James 2:14-17). 

Does it amaze you that Jesus was thinking so specifically about your spiritual protection, ongoing transformation, and Christian witness mere hours before He was stripped naked and felt a lead-tipped whip rip the flesh from His back? It takes my breath away. I hope this reality will embolden you the next time you come before the Lord in prayer. Remember, drawing near to God is a rich journey that will continue until the moment you cross into eternity.  

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Hello, God: Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short is coming out from Shepherd Press on May 25th. Stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

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Book Update: Vote for YOUR Favorite Cover!

Good morning, Blogging Family! It’s been a while since my last writing update, so I’m super excited to finally have more news to share about my second book, Hello God: Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short. As you may remember, it was originally scheduled to be released in 2024, but had to be delayed due to the health of one of our team members.

Praise the Lord, we’re on track for a spring release, and this time around we would love YOUR feedback choosing the cover design. I’d be so grateful if you’d consider voting in the comments below. Plus, voters will be entered to win 1 of 3 free copies of Hello, God!

We’ll also be rolling out some sneak previews of select chapters and illustrations in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more exciting updates. Thanks so much, as always, for your prayers and support!

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The Battle to Believe

“For God gave us a spirit, not of fear, but of power and love and self-control.”

The verse’s assurance knocked the breath out of my shivering, twelve-year-old body that Sunday morning. Suddenly everything –  the chilly sanctuary with its stiff wooden pews and the filigreed pocket Bible that was the light of my preteen eyes – vanished in the blazing glory of the Apostle Paul’s declaration. 

Can this really be true? I faltered in the face of my hitherto unshakable fears: How would I score at my next violin competition? Would “normal” kids ever accept me since I was homeschooled and loved literature and classical music? What’s more, my fears were founded on reality. I could perform poorly, and I’d experienced my share of social rejection. But God, through the Apostle Paul, was promising me power, and love, and self-control in spite of my experiences. And God never lied. How would I respond? 

That morning was the first time I remember encountering 2 Timothy 1:7, but since then God has reminded me of that promise at crucial moments when I’ve felt like I was about to be overpowered by fear. Perhaps my preteen troubles seem trivial to us adults, but we can all remember how the hardships we experienced as young people seemed like the pinnacle of suffering. It’s only with additional life experience (and cognitive and emotional development), that we gain perspective to evaluate those circumstances in a more holistic light.  

The same is true of our suffering as adults. Perhaps an illness, or lay-off, or relational fracture that seemed almost beyond our capacity to endure five years ago looks different now that we have seen God sustain us over time and discerned what he was teaching. Each time he brings us through a trial, it should increase our confidence in his faithfulness for the next trial. 

I say “should” because in my own life, I’ve discovered this process is not always linear. Severe physical suffering has been a personal theme for many years, and I’ve been blessed that God had helped me to cling to what I know to be true of him and his Word during those times. But as God graciously removed the suffering I endured from uncontrolled seizures, I’ve been confronted with some relational disconnects that the seizures camouflaged. And I’ve discovered that, because of my brain injury, painful emotions can shake me much more deeply than physical suffering ever did. Although my verbal skills are high, my rational and emotional processing can become disconnected when I perceive something’s wrong or there’s actual conflict. The result is that even though I know certain things are true about God, his Word, or even a particular person, it can be extremely hard to overcome the hurt once it’s imprinted. 

I share this struggle because, while not everyone has a brain injury, I believe we all find ourselves in similar situations at some point. There will come a time for all of us when what we know about God and his Word – and possibly the person in front of us – doesn’t line up with how we’re feeling. And we’ll discover our feelings seem impossible to overcome. Like my twelve-year-old self on that Sunday morning, we’ll be confronted with the question, “Now what?” My preteen fears didn’t vanish overnight. I memorized 2 Timothy 1:7 and repeated it over and over again before I saw measurable change. I’m still in the trenches of a daily battle to believe that God’s Spirit of “power, love, and self-control” is fully available to me every moment of every day, no matter what the day may hold. The key is to keep asking God for his power, trusting that he never gets tired of my requests (James 1:5), and that he delights to give good things to all who ask him (Luke 11:13). That is who he always has been, and that is who he always will be. Will you join me?