The following entries are excerpts from Chad Bird’s upcoming book, Untamed Prayers: 365 Daily Devotions on Christ in the Book of the Psalms (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 191-192.
We rejoice that this urchin is now at rest in the arms of his known God who binds up the broken hearted and sets the captives free.
When your child asks about what we believe, and why we believe it…answer.

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As I floated in the Gulf of Mexico, I spoke these truths, but it was not the waters or the heavens that needed to hear them.
This chorus digs below the surface to reveal that beneath our chosen self-medications, be they alcohol or drugs or overeating or smoking or bed-hopping, you’ll unearth the real killer. And “it ain’t the whiskey.”
By the time we pulled off the side of the road, they had spilled out and surrounded our vehicle.
This summer, I made my first trip to Europe since 1984. One of the things I signed up to do was a food tour of the Marais District of Paris. My guide Catherine took us on a circuit through a small area of a neighborhood showing us the best in many food categories.
Whatever numbers you want to plug in, ours must be greater than zero. We’re in a partnership with God, after all. We both do our part. We’ve got to meet the Lord halfway. If only he does all the giving, and we do all the receiving, the relationship is doomed to fail.
The psalmist writes that our earthly lives last “seventy years, or eighty, if we have the strength.” As if proving the poet right, and showing the world that she did have that kind of strength, Alvena fought on to her eightieth year.
My prayer life is, first and foremost, a pitiful and distracting thing and my experience of answers delayed has often felt like Cheech's experience on the bench in this skit with Chong playing the roll of prayer answerer.
Who are we, really, but a bag of blood and bones, in which are mixed in bittersweet memories and the shards of shattered dreams and broken hearts?
St. Paul talks about faith that is weak and by his description of what it looks like, I lived there; I've been the weak brother. It appears that a firm faith is that faith that trusts in the goodness of God for you based on something outside of you – not on some special, superior knowledge, but having your name known and loved by God.
Because I do care now, and will care even after I’m with the Lord, here are some things I hope and pray are not said at my funeral. I care about those who will be there, about what they will hear.
In an American evangelical landscape that emphasizes the importance of an individual’s personal decision to follow Jesus—as if that were the basis for God’s grace towards a man or woman—Lutherans and Reformed Christians insist that justification before God is based solely on Jesus’ work, two millennia ago.
You think the sower sowed his seed in you because he saw such good soil, such a good, generous, noble person.