Hi, and welcome to Five Word Prayers Daily, a five day a week daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, and our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

My mother is a wise woman, and she's told me many wise things. But there's one thing she told me once that has stuck with me all these years that I want to

share with you today, and it has to do with a powerful declaration of sorts we can make over a

situation that is too much for us to handle. I'll tell you what I mean in a minute.

Some of you who are familiar with my writing and maybe have been following me for a while have probably heard me talk about my growing up in a pastor's family and how my father,

who was for years a Baptist pastor, went through some really hard things in his ministry.

And so as a result, we, his family,

went through them with him. I obviously don't have time to talk about it all in this podcast,

not nearly all. I wrote about some of it in my book, Hull some years back, but in a very small

nutshell, he lost his church over, amongst other things, a very public court case with the IRS

because of some side business dealings. It was difficult and painful for all of us, and especially

my father, who, by the way, went to heaven this past April, and I got the honor of being right

by his side when he did. But at that time for him,

when he lost his church, he struggled a lot. And I can remember as a young woman watching him go

through this, sitting down with my mother and asking her how she as a wife was handling all

of it and how she was, of course, supportive of him as a wife, but also how she wasn't

tempted to rescue him in some way, as we, as women are often tempted to do. Just that balance

and how she could give him to God while he was clearly in the middle of a mess that she

didn't have the clue to know how to solve for him.

And she said this to me and I'll never forget it.

Lisa, so many times I've wanted to fix it for him and God has just said to me, Kathy, that's my mom's name, obviously.

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