Blog - Page 2 of 93 - Jodie Berndt

How to wake up in the morning (in the month of May-hem and beyond)

05.03.2025

It’s here. The month of May-hem. The slower rhythms of summer are coming, but they’re not on us just yet. And if your calendar looks like mine, you may be wondering if you will even make it to June, what with all of the graduations, weddings, recitals, end-of-year parties—and let’s not forget Mother’s Day.

(Seriously. Let’s not forget Mother’s Day.)

May is not like December. December gets heralded months in advance; we’re braced for impact by mid-November. Not so with May. May can sneak up on the unwary. One minute it’s April and you’re dreaming about a spring garden–should you try pink petunias this year?—and then boom. It’s May, and you need 30 treat bags for the baseball party tomorrow.

Where do we turn for relief? I can’t answer that—not completely, anyway—but I can share something that has been life-changing for me.

(Well, potentially life-changing; I’ve only been doing this for about 12 days now. But people say it works.)

(And by “people,” I mean Andy Crouch.)

I’ve long been a fan of Andy’s (I loved his books, Playing God and The Tech-Wise Family), and it was a huge treat to hear him speak last month at the Center for Christian Study’s 50^th Anniversary Celebration in Charlottesville. (Sidebar: If you have a kid going to the University of Virginia, or you know a student who’s headed there, click this link; the Study Center’s Move-In Day lunches are not to be missed for those looking to build Christian community from Day 1 of their college experience.)

Andy talked about a lot of things—the difference between “space” and “place”, for example, and how place kindles memory, a concept he linked to Deuteronomy 6—and I wanted more. I started poking around online and stumbled upon a short YouTube clip in which Andy talked about how to wake up in the morning—and what was clearly the wrong way to start your day.

Andy confessed that he had long held to an “ironclad rule” of checking his phone every morning, first thing. “I let the glowing rectangle tell me whatever I needed to pay attention to,” he said. Realizing that there had to be a better way, he resolved to ignore his phone and go outside as soon as he woke up, even if that meant descending several flights of stairs in a hotel on the other side of the world. What Andy discovered, as he pursued this new practice, was the gift of perspective and the ability to be who he really was: “A very small part of a very large world, rather than what I am on the screen, which is a very large part of a very small world.”

Andy’s words resonated, and I resolved to do the same thing. I woke up and, instead of checking text messages or the weather on an app, I stepped outside with my coffee and felt the actual air. (And yes, I am grateful that it is not still February.)

It was glorious!

It was glorious the next day. And the next—getting up and going outside, leaving my phone plugged into the charger. At first, I wondered if I might miss something important (What if one of my children needs me? What if they changed the time for today’s meeting? What if I won some sort of Fabulous Prize?), but it wasn’t long before I realized that it didn’t matter. Waiting a few minutes—or half an hour—wouldn’t change anything. No matter what my phone (or my ego) might want me to believe, I am just not that essential.

Andy was right.

(Of course he was right; he wrote a whole book about putting technology in its proper place.)

Do try this at home

Today, if you drive by our house in the early morning, you might just spot me on the front porch, dressed in my favorite bathrobe or sporting some sort of workout gear. I’ll have a big cup of coffee and, more often than not, a favorite devotional book. Our dog Minnie is apt to be out there, too, sniffing the day to see what it holds.

Want to join me? The coffee isn’t required (Andy drinks tea), and you don’t need a book (Andy goes outside on his own). But if you’re like I am and you often sense God’s presence when words are around, consider starting your day with intentional praise.

Praise “changes our attitude, brings an awareness of God’s presence; defeats Satan; releases God’s power; brings a victorious perspective; provides peace; wards of the spirits of self-pity, depression, and discouragement; and produces strength in an anxious heart.” That’s according to Moms in Prayer founder Fern Nichols, quoted in Praying the Scriptures for Your Life, and honestly? I want every. single. one. of those benefits!

Right now, I’m igniting praise with the help of Ruth Myer’s classic, 31 Days of Praise:

The chapters are short—less than two pages—and chock full of Scripture. I often find myself reading each entry out loud (a habit I like to think Minnie appreciates).

Another time-tested favorite is Sara Hagerty’s Adore. Sara knows what it’s like to wake up and not feel like giving God praise, times when grief, disappointment, or worry fills the radar screen of our lives. But, Sara says, that’s actually the best time to adore. “God does not want our polished pretenses,” she says. “He wants us to come honestly. He invites us to wrestle.”

Truth be told, you don’t need a devotional book. You can just grab your Bible and start praising your way through the psalms, kind of like Jesus did. If you do one a day, that will get you through the end of September (by which time you’ll be wishing you’d clicked that link for my favorite bathrobe).

So…here’s to deep breaths and morning calm in the month of Mayhem. You might not hear from me for awhile–hooray for Summer!—but if you live in Virginia Beach and you happen to pass by our house before 7 a.m., I hope you’ll wave!

An Immeasurably More Love

03.17.2025

If you could ask God to do anything for your family, what would that be? And what would it look like if God were to do immeasurably more than anything you could imagine?

Most of us probably have a ready answer to the first question. We have a mental list of unmet longings and desires: Heal my dad’s cancer. Let my niece get pregnant. Provide a job for my son…a husband for my daughter…a good friend for my child. Even if we’ve never spoken our prayer out loud or logged it in a journal, we know what we want.

That second question, though, is harder to process. What does “immeasurably more” look like in real life?

The thing is, we don’t know. The Bible says God is “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20), and that’s kind of the point: We can’t imagine how much God can—and will—do. Even Bible people found themselves taken aback by the “plus plus” of his power.

Think about Zechariah and Elizabeth, the couple Luke describes as “righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly.” (Luke 1:6) They were godly folk, and we have to figure they’d prayed for a child. But Elizabeth was barren. And they were, as the Bible so graciously puts it, “well along” in years. They were old.

But then came Zechariah’s moment. He was chosen, by lot, to offer incense in the temple—a once-in-a-lifetime honor for a priest. Along with offering incense, a big part of the priest’s job was to pray for the nation of Israel, including a petition for the promised Messiah. Did Zechariah sneak in a side prayer for his own family, while he was at it?

We don’t know, but it sure looks that way. The angel shows up and tells Zechariah his prayer “has been heard.” And then he drops the joy-bomb: Elizabeth will have a son, a boy who will “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” (Luke 1:13-17)

In other words, both prayers—the official priestly prayer for Israel’s Messiah and the secret “I-just-want-to-be-a-dad” longing of Zechariah’s heart—found their answer in a single moment.

Immeasurably more than Zechariah was expecting.

An above-and-beyond love

What about Elizabeth? Was she still praying for a baby, after so many years?

Again, we don’t know; my guess is that her prayer might have shifted in her old age. Sure, she still longed to become a mother, but based on her response when she discovers she’s pregnant—she says that God has “shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people”—it seems like Elizabeth’s deeper hurt might have been the ostracism she experienced. As a barren woman, she was an outsider. She didn’t belong.

Here again, God does immeasurably more: He gives Elizabeth a baby and removes all traces of shame.

We see this pattern again and again in the gospels. For instance, when Jesus heals the anonymous woman who’d been bleeding for twelve years, he doesn’t just stop her physical suffering. He seeks her out—identifies her in the crowd—because he wants her to know that she is seen. That she is known. That she belongs in the family of God.

“Daughter,” Jesus says in Mark 5:34, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

The more I learn about God’s immeasurably more answers, the more I’m convinced that the whole point of him going above-and-beyond is that he wants us—all of us—to know how much he loves us. How much he understands us. How much he wants to remove any barrier—physical, emotional, or spiritual—that might keep us from knowing that we belong.

Last month, I was privileged to speak at The Pauline Chapel, a little jewel tucked just to the side of Colorado’s Broadmoor Hotel.

I’d been thinking about how God reads the unspoken cries of our heart—the longings we might not even be consciously aware of, the blessings that have yet to be formed in our minds’ eye—and how he responds. I wound up sharing one of my favorite “immeasurably more” answers to prayer with the Broadmoor community. I’ll sum it up here (and if you want more details, you’ll find the whole story in Praying the Scriptures for Your Children.)

What happens when we pray

Once upon a time, I was part of a Moms in Prayer group that met weekly to pray for our children, often with prayers birthed in Scripture. One week, we focused on Ephesians 5:15-16, asking God to help our kids be “very careful how they lived—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity.”

A few weeks later, one of the moms showed up and told us that that prayer had been answered—in a way none of us could have predicted—in the lives of two second-grade boys.

One of the boys, Eddie, was renowned for his misbehavior. Most kids gave Eddie a wide berth, lest he poke them with a pencil, pull their ponytail, or worse. But one little boy, Brandon, often went out of his way to be kind, and one day, when the teacher asked each child to write a persuasive letter to someone, Brandon picked Eddie.

When the time came to deliver the letters, the children who had written to parents or grandparents (trying to persuade them to buy a new bike or whatever) stuffed their notes in their backpacks to take home. Brandon simply dropped his on Eddie’s desk. Eddie was excited—but when he opened the letter, his face fell. He couldn’t read well enough to get past the first couple of words. Brandon asked the teacher—who just happened to be a Christian—if he could read the letter to his friend. The teacher agreed, telling him he could do it at recess.

That afternoon, the boys sat on a log under an old oak tree, oblivious to the shouts and games being played all around them. Eddie pulled the letter out of his pocket and leaned in to listen.

Dear Eddie, Brandon began. Please, please ask Jesus to come into your heart. Here are some reasons why:

Jesus died on the cross for your sins.
You will have eternal life.
God (Jesus’ father) is maker and creator of all.
You will go to heaven.
You can have anything you want in heaven.
I will be waiting for you.
God will be waiting for you.
Jesus will be waiting for you.
You can do anything in heaven.

P.S. All you have to do is bow your head right now and say, “Dear Lord, I want Jesus to come into my heart so I can have eternal life.” Amen.

Eddie sat back. “Would you, Brandon asked cautiously, “like to pray?”

“Yes,” Eddie said.

Sitting together at the edge of the playground, the two boys bowed their heads as Brandon led Eddie into the kingdom of God.

Friends, we don’t know—we can’t know—how God will answer our prayers. But we can slip our hand into his, trusting that he really is able to do immeasurably more than anything we can imagine.

And that his deepest desire is to have us turn to him, just like Eddie did, and say, “Yes.”

Heavenly Father,

You know I am concerned about ______. Please do immeasurably more than all I can ask or imagine in this situation, and help me trust you.

Amen.

Mom Life: Watch, Print, ScreenSave, and Share!

02.14.2025

Hi Friends! Mom Life Unscripted premiered on Focus on the Family’s YouTube channel this week, and the response has been super encouraging. I’m sharing a quick recap with some links today, but I also have a little request: If mom life stuff isn’t your thing, please don’t unsubscribe! I love our email friend group, and I promise it won’t be “all moms all the time” in the months to come. In fact, I have a half-written post about how God meets our desires and our unmet longings in ways that go far beyond what we think we are asking. I can’t wait to finish that one and share it with you next month!

But for those who DO want to know more about navigating life with toddlers, teens, and kids in their twenties (and beyond), I want to be sure you get looped in for the good stuff.

Episode 1 featured Alexa PenaVega, a beautiful actress, author, and mom. She talked about the reality of heaven (an awareness made all the more poignant after the loss of their baby daughter), the peace and joy that come with surrender, and the fact that we’ll never be “Christian enough” for some people and we’ll always be “too Christian” for others, so we need to just look at God and say: “Where do you want me, Lord? How do you want me using my voice?”

At the end of each episode, you’re invited to click the link in the YouTube description to access a collection of scripture prayers you can use to pray for yourself and your children. The prayers come in three different forms: Printable cards to keep in your purse or your journal, screen savers you can use on your phone (a great reminder to pray all day long!), and a one-page sheet that has all six prayers in one place (I taped mine by my coffee pot).

We’ll have new prayers each week, available just for the asking. Click this link for all the details, or just text MOM to 32728 and you’re in!

This coming Monday, I talk with Alyssa Bethke, who wrote a terrific book called When Doing it All is Undoing You (is that a great title or what?). Just like you’d expect from a mom who knows what it’s like to “do it all,” Alyssa showed up on set, pregnant with her fourth child, less than three weeks shy of her due date:

Alyssa got right to the heart of a lot of the mom life wrestle: Figuring out what we can control (and what we can’t). Being okay with a kitchen (or a life!) that doesn’t look like a Pinterest board. Knowing that the hidden moments of our lives – the seasons when we feel unseen, or like we don’t have much to show for ourselves – can be the times when God is actually doing his best work.

It was a rich conversation, punctuated by laughter and at least one “what if” when Alyssa wondered what would happen if she went into labor, right there on the show. What if her water broke?

Truth be told, that would have been a relatively calm scenario, compared to what actually happened. I won’t steal their thunder, other than to say that never have I ever heard a more incredible childbirth story. If you have Instagram, check out @JeffersonBethke and read his account of the baby’s arrival. If you don’t use that platform, well. Just picture a driveway-turned-delivery-room, a 12-year-old midwife, and a MacGyver-esque neighbor who just needed a shoelace.

(All is well…mama is fine…and baby Jayden is absolutely beautiful and utterly worthy of one of the best birth stories every told!)

Phew! Mom life is never dull!

I hope you’ll join us next week (or jump in anytime; that’s the beauty of YouTube). I promise I’ll keep working on that post about God showing up and exceeding our unmet longings, but for now, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite prayers for times when you feel under attack, out of control, or just like you don’t know which way is up in your parenting journey:

Heavenly Father,

I don’t know what to do but my eyes are on you. (2 Chronicles 12:20)

Amen

Mom Life Unscripted: A new show for you!

02.06.2025

Friends! I’m popping (popping!) into your inbox today with some exciting news. Next Monday, February 10, Focus on the Family will begin airing weekly episodes of a new show called Mom Life Unscripted with Jodie & Friends.

Each week, I’ll talk with another mom about the wonderful, messy, challenging, beautiful adventure of MOTHERHOOD.

Our first guest is probably better known for her movies than her mothering (I loved her as Carmen Cortez in Spy Kids; now she’s making good-clean-fun films for grown-ups), but Alexa PenaVega opens up about her family and the joys and heartaches she has walked through as a mom, including the devastating loss of their daughter, Indy, and the ways she and her husband Carlos have prioritized family life in an entertainment industry that is not built to sustain healthy marriages.

Celebrity spotlight aside, I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges we face as moms (and grandmoms). How do we know what’s best for our child? Where do we turn when we grow weary, or when we feel overwhelmed? What can we do to cultivate more patience and kindness in our parenting? The Bible talks about all of these things and, to celebrate the release of Mom Life Unscripted, I wove those thoughts together with some of my favorite verses to create A Mother’s Prayer.

This printable PDF, designed especially for our email community, covers everything from the wisdom we need to the worries we carry as we ask God to bless and protect our families. Click here to download the prayer and print it for yourself (and feel free to share this email with another mom who might want to join our friend group).

Where do I watch Mom Life Unscripted?

And now for the question that everyone’s asking: Where do I watch Mom Life Unscripted?

That’s a great question, actually, and one that it’s taken Yours Truly more than a minute to comprehend. Mom Life Unscripted will air on Focus on the Family’s flagship YouTube channel, which means you can watch on your phone, your computer, or (if you’re tech savvy like my husband) on your TV. If you want to be notified when each new episode drops, click this link and then click again where it says “Notify Me.”

The episodes are sized just right for busy moms (about 20 minutes each), but they’re chock full of encouraging stories and practical wisdom for navigating life in the trenches of motherhood. Plus, every show wraps with an invitation to access a collection of prayer resources specific to each episode, free downloads you can use as you trust God to accomplish his best purposes in your family’s life.

And with that little teaser, I’ll leave you with my favorite line from Spy Kids, one that Alexa (aka “Carmen”) delivers near the end of the film:

Spy work, that’s easy. Keeping a family together, that’s difficult. And that’s the mission worth fighting for.

Mom Life can feel like a battle, but it’s worth it. Hang in there, friends!

❤️

And P.S., if you want to rephrase the Spy Kids line as a prayer, you’ll find a parallel sentiment in Nehemiah 4:14. Here’s how this verse looks when we turn it into a prayer:

Heavenly Father,

When we feel exhausted and under attack, don’t let us be afraid. Instead, may we remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for our families, our sons and our daughters, our homes.

Amen

The Power of Endurance: Hang in There, Friend

01.27.2025

Do you have a word of the year for 2025? I don’t. But as we prepare to flip the calendar over to February, I (finally) know what word I’d pick to describe 2024. My 2024 word is endurance.

I’m not sure, exactly, when “endurance” became the refrigerator hum for the year. Maybe it was when I taught a Bible Study on James, who says we should consider it “pure joy” when we face all kinds of trials. The way James 1:2-4 tells it, the painful stuff we go through tests our faith and produces perseverance (aka “endurance”), which ultimately makes us mature and complete. Perfect, some versions say. Well-developed. Lacking in nothing.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I needed (or wanted) to be mature and complete. Not if it meant having to go through—having to endure—things like sickness, financial hardship, or complicated relationships. Don’t get me wrong; I know suffering can produce good things in our lives—things like compassion, humility, and even a more resilient faith. But as I considered the gut-punching pain some dear friends were waking up to every day, I wondered if those promised benefits might ring a bit hollow. “I’m not sure these gals need more compassion or a stronger faith,” I said to the Lord. “What I think they need is to have their marriage restored. Their cancer gone. Their son to come home.”

That was my take on my friends’ suffering. Remarkably, though, they had a different perspective.

None of them looked or sounded joyful, at least not the way I would describe joy. All of them shared their stories through tears, both angry and sad. But even in their heartache, they were all holding on, standing firm in their faith. And they said they were open to joy.

“I’m not there yet,” the youngest confided. “I can see how God has prepared me, and how he’s provided friends to give me counsel and comfort, but I’ve never felt this level of sadness before.

“But,” she continued, “this ache is revealing a new side of Jesus, because I’ve never needed his comfort like this before. I’ve never needed this Jesus before.”

God can handle our doubts and our questions

My young friend’s words all but undid me. She was discovering a deeper connection with Jesus as a result of her suffering, one that was transforming her faith—shaping her character and glowing her up—just like James promised. Having read somewhere that every painful experience can become a portal to intimacy with God, I went back to James to learn more about the power of endurance.

Near the end of his letter, James offers three real-life examples of what it looks like to be patient in suffering: The farmer (who has to wait for his crop), the prophets (many of whom endured ridicule, rejection, and physical pain), and Job.

Job? The guy who lost his wealth, his health, and even his children?

Not to get all testy about it, but if I am God and I want people to want to endure—to want to hang in there, when everything seems like it’s coming undone—I feel like I might pick a better, more appealing, character study. Noah, maybe, having to spend all that time shut up in the ark. Or Joseph, innocent but forgotten in prison. Almost anybody but Job, whose story only gets happy a few verses before it is over.

But the more I considered Job’s life (and processed insights from folks like Tim Keller, Warren Wiersbe, and Eugene Peterson), the more I realized that Job is actually a great role model for us when it comes to endurance. Here’s why:

Job didn’t bear his immense suffering with a stiff upper lip. He cursed the day he was born, wishing he had died as a baby. He questioned God (“Why have you made me your target?”). He got frustrated and confused when God didn’t answer.

And, through it all, he kept going.

Like the psalmist who cries How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?, Job never stopped praying. He didn’t walk away from his faith or turn his back on the Lord; he kept talking, even when God remained silent. And Job never pulled away from community—not even when his “friends” showed up to provide comfort, only to spend their days telling him what he must have done wrong.

Job didn’t retreat. Instead, he held fast to his faith, staking his trust in what he knew to be true about God:

“If I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.

But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.”

God knows the way that we take.

I have that passage—Job 23:8-10—starred in my Bible. It’s a comfort and an anchor when I feel unseen, or when I have no idea what God is up to. It serves as a testimony to the power of endurance in the hard seasons, a reminder to keep doing the things that we did when life was happy and fun: Talk to God, go to church, stick close to our friends instead of pulling away or tucking into our shell like a uncertain turtle.

As Richard Foster put it in his book, Prayer, “What we learned to do in the light of God’s love, we also do in the dark of God’s absence.”

Put one foot in front of the other

I was still teasing out my thoughts on endurance, pondering the promise of passages like Romans 5:3-5 (which traces the pathway from suffering to hope and highlights the role of endurance), when I found myself in Hawaii last December. Not to go to the beach (although the chairs and umbrellas looked mighty inviting), but to join a few friends for a marathon.

As in, a 26.2 mile marathon.

To be clear, the event organizers said we could walk the whole thing; the idea was to promote movement and fitness at every level. Still, though. Doing a marathon—at any pace—was never really on my bucket list, and I found myself, around mile 18, wondering what I had gotten myself into. It was hot (a factor we hardly noticed, since it was so humid), the course was not flat (which came as a surprise), and—truth be told—my longest training run leading up to the race was only eight miles. Because honestly. Who has time to run (or worse, walk) longer than that?

“Endurance.”

I sensed the Lord whisper that one little word as I eyeballed mile-marker 19 in the distance. Had I not been so focused on finding the next water station, I might have actually laughed out loud. Here was God, telling me to keep going. To remember the wisdom from James. To simply do what I’d been doing since the start of the race and just put one foot in front of the other.

As it was, I did not laugh. Instead, I reached into my fanny pack and pulled out the card my fitness-guru friend Alisa had given me the night before.

Psalm 55:22. “Cast your cares on the Lord, and he will sustain you.”

Could there be a more beautiful promise—mid-marathon, mid-marriage crumble, mid-health crisis, or mid-anything?

When the hard seasons come—the times when putting one foot in front of the other feels like all we can do—consider the fact that that might be enough. God never asks us to carry our burdens alone; he doesn’t even ask us to pull half the weight. Instead, he invites us to let the hard things in our lives slide off our shoulders and onto his.

Hang in there, friend.

You might not see God in your season of suffering, but he knows the way that you take. ❤️