You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Some promises are dangerous, offering more than can seemingly be delivered. This statement of Jesus’ strikes me that way: “Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.” Anything? If even just two of us agree?
Is this a promise with a back-door clause – is it so unlikely that two people on earth would ever fully agree about any request, God has an automatic out? No, let’s assume Jesus was being straightforward. That might leave us doubting God, knowing that we have prayed for outcomes with many people in whole-hearted agreement, without seeing them come to pass. Exhibit A are prayers for healing that are not visibly answered.
This is one of those bible verses that cannot be separated from the one that follows. It only accords with both faith and experience when seen in tandem with this: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Ah, now we’re not only talking about human agreement. We’re talking about being gathered as the Body of Christ, in his very presence. To pray in Jesus’ name is to pray as Christ; to pray from inside, as it were; to invoke the power that his very name makes manifest. To pray in Jesus’ name is to pray in agreement with him, and thus to pray with perfect faith. Our own is far from perfect, but Jesus’ is 100%. When we pray with Jesus, not only to Jesus, we have all the faith we need.
So why are some of our prayers not answered as we desire? Perhaps we weren’t quite praying in Christ. Maybe we were bringing forward our desires and seeking God's blessing upon them, like a pie at the county fair. “Here, isn’t this one pretty? Don’t you want to give it a prize?” Sometimes that yields answers we recognize. But our prayers feel more effective when we pray what Jesus is already praying for; his prayers come pre-blessed. We just need to figure out what Jesus’ desires are – and we get a glimpse in the scriptures. Peace. Healing. Equity for the poor. Justice. Inclusion. Holiness.
What are some of the “unanswered prayers” in your life? Most of us have some, and they often put distance between us and God. Call one to mind today. Have you ever asked God what God thinks about that prayer? Ever discussed it with Jesus? Ever paid attention to the Spirit in you when you pray about that? We might even try asking God: "What is your desire for me in this area?" God's answer could surprise us. We might have to stay still for a time, and attend to what words or images or songs arise in us, now or later.
Prayer is not about getting what we want. It’s about deepening a relationship, one that will last forever. We need to speak our desires – that's good communicating, being real. The more we cultivate intimacy with Jesus, the more we’ll find ourselves truly praying in his name, his will, his mind, his heart.
And sometimes, as Garth Brooks reminds us, there are reasons we only discover later for what feel were Unanswered Prayers.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Do we want this much power? Several times Jesus sets our authority to offer or withhold forgiveness into a cosmic framework, saying that what we do in this world is mirrored in the heavenly realm. “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Yikes!
Maybe Jesus teaches this process of confrontation and reconciliation because there are such cosmic consequences to ignoring conflict and pain. When we bury our hurts, sweep our conflicts under the rug, not only do we stay bound, we keep the perpetrators of hurts bound to us. No one is free.
I believe that what God wants most for us is freedom. I have seen the process of healing and forgiving result in amazing freedom for people, huge releasing of energy and giftedness, new ability to see, to hope, to live. As I reflect on this, stories of survivors of sexual abuse and trauma come to mind. (The next two paragraphs contain nothing explicit, but if this is a sensitive area for you, read with care.)
I once prayed for months with a woman who had endured sexual abuse throughout her life – people who have been victimized as children often suffer similar abuse in adulthood. This woman saw herself more as victim than survivor, and engaged in self-harm as well. Once I said something to her about moving toward forgiveness. She turned on me in fury and said, “They told me in my support group that I don’t ever have to forgive!” I backed down, thinking, “That is true – but then will you ever be free?” Forgiveness cannot be rushed, but to close ourselves to it leaves us bound to people who have hurt us.
Years later I prayed with another woman. She and her two sisters had been sexually abused throughout childhood by their father and grandfather, who were still alive and in the family. She had done the excruciating work of addressing those wounds and moving toward healing, and had come to forgive her abusers. She did not trust or get close to them, and was vigilant to ensure the safety of children in the family system, but over time she released the awful burden of their crimes. And then she was no longer psychically connected to them – forgiveness meant freedom from them. Her sisters refused to do this work; one was deeply alcoholic and the other suicidal. As brutal as it is to work at healing from trauma, it is a movement toward freedom, toward life.
Few of us experience trauma this severe – but we might feel bound in some way by a hurt we have suffered or anger we continue to hold. Usually the anger is justified, but it can still be corrosive over time. Today, can we let some of those stuck places come up in our mind, and pray about forgiving people who have hurt us, or ask forgiveness of those whom we have hurt? If we ask the Spirit to show us those things, they often emerge from the muck.
Inner healing is a powerful process of bringing the love of God to bear on our emotional wounds. I have witnessed tremendous transformation result from the healing of memories and specific areas of woundedness. (If you want to know more about this process, please contact me.) As we release that healing stream of God’s love and power to soak into hidden wounds and resentments, life returns to parched places, and old knots become unwound so that peace can flood in.
“It is for freedom that Christ has made us free,” Paul wrote. Jesus has won for us freedom to release ourselves and others. Let’s set the captives free.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
We love to talk about how inclusive church should be. But In this week’s gospel passage, Jesus suggests conditions for exclusion. He lays out a process for dealing with conflict in the community of faith, by which someone who has inflicted hurt might participate in repentance and reconciliation. He also provides a contingency for those occasions when the offending party is unable or unwilling to be reconciled:
“If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
On the face of it, this approach seems realistic, if harsh. If trust has been breached in the community, and attempts at repair have failed, perhaps wholeness can only be gained by isolating the offender. No doubt this teaching gave rise to the practice of shunning and excommunication in some Christian groups. Separating an offender from the community at large can be an act of punishment or protection or both. It is also an act of aggression, even if warranted as in the case of an abusive spouse or parent whose presence in the community would make it impossible for the survivor to remain there.
I wonder, though, if Jesus meant something else entirely. The way Jesus treated Gentiles and tax collectors was to eat with them and heal them, invite them to repent and to join his community. The people he seemed to have no desire to be in relationship with were the "holy folks," the religious leaders. Is Jesus inviting us to go deeper into reconciliation than is comfortable? Is he suggesting we open ourselves to the Other who has hurt us, to see her wounds and distorted perceptions, reach across the divide with love that has the power to transform?
That is an intriguing read of this passage. As a strategy, it leaves room for growth, where distancing and isolating offenders does not. I knew a church in which a new member, still a seeker in faith, was found to have been viewing internet pornography involving minors. He complied with law enforcement when discovered, entering willingly into the justice process and into therapy, hoping to find deliverance from this compulsive behavior. But people in the church were unwilling to have him around except under very stringent guidelines – rules so strict they ensured he could never become part of that otherwise loving community in which he might have found healing and transformation. I believe safety for all could have been ensured without this degree of exclusion – but we’ll never know. He did not stay long under these strictures, and neither he nor his wife continued their exploration of the Christian life. And some members of that church missed an opportunity to expand their capacity to love the sinner – and so to experience God’s love more fully.
Of course, each situation demands its own discernment. Reaching out must be accompanied by true honesty, within safe boundaries for those hurt. In the Truth Commissions set up in South Africa during the dismantling of apartheid, reconciliation was forged not by burying grievances, but by bringing them into the light, speaking them in truth and clarity, with the perpetrators there to hear the effects of their actions and invited to repent. Healing for victims can happen without the repentance of perpetrators, but when you have both, there is ground for deeper engagement, deeper community.
Is there someone you have shut out of your life or community because of harm they have caused? Can you imagine reconciliation on any level? If so, pray for a vision of how. If not, can you pray for that person to be healed and even blessed? When someone is blessed, she is much less able to hurt.
None of this is easy, nor simple. Yet it is at the heart of the Good News which we are called to live.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Conflict is a fact of life – or at least a fact of human nature. Wherever two or three are gathered, there are likely to be four or five competing desires, sometimes within one person. We don’t all see things the same way; each has her own lenses borne of personal history and circumstances and brain chemistry. We don’t all want or feel we need the same things; inevitably one person’s want gets in the way of some other good, as, say, a desire for untrammeled speed will compromise the safety of others.
Christian communities are not immune to conflict. In fact, they are often conflict incubators, since people often come to them hoping for the idyllic family they never had, dragging along their thwarted, dysfunctional baggage. Conflict within a church family is a given. It’s what we do with it that makes the difference. As my friend Peter likes to say, “Conflict doesn’t kill churches. Suppressed conflict kills churches.”
Jesus knew that the community of his followers would include hurt and conflict – witness the infighting among his disciples while he was yet with them. So he laid out a process for dealing with it: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.”
Jesus’ teaching makes great psychological sense. First, we are to show the courage and respect to speak privately to the person who’s hurt us. Don’t triangulate conflicts by talking to a third person before sharing your feelings honestly with the first. How many conflicts could be quickly deflated by this simple step. Yet many of us have been conditioned not to confront people, so we let it escalate.
If that conversation goes nowhere because the other person isn’t open to hearing how you feel, bring in that third or fourth person – but in the presence of the one who’s hurt you, not behind his back. Now it becomes a community issue, and out in the light. And if that doesn’t work, Jesus says to bring your grievance before the whole community. Yikes! Why would we ever do that?
Well, we would model openness and vulnerability and transparency. We would invite prayer for ourselves and the person who has hurt us. We would offer our wound for healing, and open ourselves to the transforming power of love. Can this get messy? Sure it can. But it’s not nearly as toxic as a conflict that is allowed to fester.
Can you think of a time when you were hurt by someone? Were you able to articulate it? Did you speak of it to others before you spoke to that person? Did you distance yourself from that person or the community? Have you forgiven?
If the memory is still painful, that's a sign that it remains unhealed – and that is something to invite the Holy Spirit into. It’s never too late to forgive and be set free, even if the person who hurt you is no longer in your life.
This teaching assumes relationship and intimacy within the Body of Christ. Many of our congregations are far from that. Maybe that’s where we start – by getting close enough that hurts can happen. And loving enough to forgive and heal.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
I lean toward the “grace and love” aspects of God as the Scriptures and Jesus describe God’s Realm. Give me eight “parables of the prodigal” for any one “be warned, judgment is coming” passage. Yet, as much as Jesus described God’s Kingdom as a place of unexpected mercy and reordered rankings, he did not shy away from speaking about judgment. So he ends this teaching about taking up your cross with the reminder that there will be a reckoning: “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done."
That "repay everyone for what has been done” bit sounds ominous to me. I tend to assume, neurotically, that the Judgment will go badly for me. Maybe you share that instinct; it is what I call “original shame.” It drives Santa Claus theology – “He’s makin’ a list, checkin’ it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice…”
Only it’s not Santa who’s coming to town, but the Son of Man with his angels in the glory of his Father. Who of us can stand before such an entourage? Saint Paul didn’t think he could. “Wretched man that I am,” he wrote in Romans, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And then he answered his own question: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
The great, audacious claim of Christian faith is that the One who comes to judge is the same One who has delivered us from the power of sin and shame. United with Christ, we need fear no reckoning. As Paul goes on to say, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
No condemnation. Wow. And as we breathe that in, and allow this union with Christ to be realized in us, we find ourselves making God-ward choices, moving with the power and love of the Holy Spirit. And then we start to be able to see where Christ is in the world around us.
How does that sentence, “He will repay everyone for what has been done” sit with you? Do you assume blessing? Then you are already blessed.
Do you assume condemnation or trial? Then spend some time today with Paul’s promise of grace and love, let it work in.
Our passage ends on a cryptic note. Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” No one quite knows what that means – the next event in Matthew’s Gospel is the Transfiguration, where Peter, James and John see Jesus in his divine glory for a moment. Is that what he meant? Or did he mean the spiritual vision that allows us to see the Son of Man coming all the time?
We can pray to be so filled with the Holy Spirit that we have the spiritual vision to see what the world does not: the Son of Man coming in his glorious reign, once upon a time, for all time – and right now.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
The first image that the word “life saver” brings to my mind is that little round candy you suck on as it releases its flavor. It’s there until it’s gone. Of course, those candies are so named because they resemble life savers, the large, inflated rings affixed to the sides of ships, meant to keep you buoyant should you find yourself in the water. Their saving utility is limited by the circumstances in which they are deployed – they might save you from drowning in the short-term, but not from, say, sharks, storms or starvation. A more complete rescue is still needed.
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” On the face of it, Jesus’ remark that those who want to save their life will lose it, and vice versa, seems scrambled. When we set out to save our life, don’t we usually succeed? How could the very effort to do that guarantee defeat? That depends on what we call life.
If we consider “life” to be mere existence, Jesus’ words seem nonsensical. If we see life in a larger sense as the sum of our interactions in time and space, our bodies, minds and spirits, in relationship and in giftedness – then Jesus’ counter-intuitive words begin to harmonize. Putting our energy into preserving our existence might result in our losing flavor and shape, like those little candies. Sure, we might be alive, but are we living? A fixation on life-preservation, on security, can deliver us from the waves, but not from the more serious spiritual adversities that challenge us. As Jesus went on to say, “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”
When Jesus asks us to “lose our life for his sake,” he invites us to let go of the things we cling to, what my friend Linda called our “self-saving strategies” that we think will save us or get us affirmation. Clinging to things that are passing away doesn’t make us very secure. If you're at risk of drowning, struggling to stay alive only imperils you further. Calming down and yielding is key to survival. As we lay back in trust and let Jesus lead us into the Life he came to proclaim and demonstrate, we will find the Life he promises.- What do you grab onto when you feel threatened?
- Do you feel called to let go of something you’ve relied upon, that holds you back from giving yourself more fully to God? Ask the Holy Spirit to show you what, and how.
Jesus kept circling back to this “dying to self” thing because he needed his followers free to be led by the Spirit. We can stop trying to gain the whole world and open ourselves to the One who made it. After all, we symbolically drown new Christians at the beginning of their life in Christ. Ultimately, the life saver we need is the One who walked on water and is always here to give us a hand up.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
The culture in which most of us live is not high on self-denial, unless it’s in the service of health or beauty. Once upon a time, self-sacrifice and sharing one’s resources for the common good were high values. These days generosity is often sporadic, a reaction to emergencies and based on our perception of whether we have enough to share. We might make impulsive donations to places ravaged by fires or floods, but not ongoing support to local agencies working to end hunger or homelessness.
“Do we have enough?” stands in stark contrast to Jesus’ core teachings – and one of his most hardcore teachings was this: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Did Jesus mean “cross” in a general, “whatever-your-calling-from-God” way? Or did he mean a specific willingness to endure martyrdom? For him, death on a cross was a literal eventuality. That’s not the case for every follower. Since I hope never to be in a position of having to choose my faith in Jesus over my physical life, I look at this teaching more figuratively. Our “cross” might be anything that represents the way we are called to participate in the mission of God to make all things whole. It may or may not involve suffering; it likely will include inconvenience and even discomfort.
Perhaps before we contend with the call to self-denial and taking up of crosses, we should look at the first part of Jesus’ sentence: “If any want to become my followers.” Why would anyone today who did not already know about Jesus want to follow him? Where is he going that we want to be?
Why am I a follower of Christ? Partly, it’s habit and custom and a lifetime of choices. But why today? It’s because I believe he is Life and Truth as well as Way. Because following him gives meaning to what might otherwise appear a meandering path through life. Because I believe his power to heal is still real and still with us. And because he says he loves me. I don’t know what that means, fully, but I want to find out.
How do you answer that question? Why are you a follower of Christ? If you're not, do you want to be? Whatever your answers, you can talk to Jesus about it. If that feels impossible, talk to a person whose spiritual life you trust.
When we decide that we want to be Christ’s followers we’re more ready to lay down our privileges and prerogatives and take up our crosses. And, as we allow ourselves to be transformed in that relationship, we may also discover a stronger desire to introduce others to this way of Jesus, cross, self-denial and all.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
