Author: Jon Swanson

Social media chaplain. Author of "This is Hard: What I say when loved ones die." Writer of 300wordsaday.com and thisishard.substack.com. Helping people help others in hard times, particularly in grief.
by Jon Swanson

Praying in a heritage of prayer (part two)

(Continued from yesterday) For once I felt like a teacher when talking with Nehemiah. Or a forensic Bible student. “I realized that both you and Daniel were in positions of significant trust with foreign kings. Your book starts about 100 years after Daniel’s finishes, but we don’t know how many years passed between you. And […]

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by Jon Swanson

Praying in a heritage of prayer (part one)

One day, I got curious about Nehemiah’s prayer. I searched an online Bible for the phrase: “great and awesome God.” It’s a phrase Nehemiah uses at the beginning of his confessional prayer, the prayer he prays for months. I discovered that he wasn’t original. The phrase had been used before. “Why were you looking at […]

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by Jon Swanson

A prayer for Pentecost.

God. It is the day of Pentecost on the calendar. The day when we remember your Spirit coming into a room with the sound of a tornado, with the quiet explosion of flame. In the aftermath there was proclamation and unity, story telling and community.And then resistance from the outside and disagreement on the inside.Even […]

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by Jon Swanson

A long time praying (part three)

(Continued from Tuesday) Nehemiah interrupted my thoughts about fasting like Isaiah. “Every day I said, ‘God you are the faithful one, the committed one. Please listen to me.’ Every day I said, ‘We have sinned. Generations of us, yes, but my family too. And I have sinned, God.’ That reminder was important to me as […]

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