Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the

word, prayers, in 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. Happy Monday, friends. I've decided I like

Mondays more because it means we get to get back together after a weekend apart. And honestly,

that's been a good shift for me in thinking because Mondays have always been kind of hard for me

to get back into things. Same for you. Well, today's show I believe and hope will be a good one.

It's certainly one I hope will help us as we find ourselves in the midst of a lot of tough

spots in life and a lot of causes

people want us to fight for different sides of the fence on political issues. What do we do with our

angst over things? How do we move forward? And what is true effectiveness and what gets in our

way of that on the daily today.

So about 10 years ago now, I traveled to El Salvador with Compassion International,

and while I was there, I saw many things, much of which I brought back with me in my mind and found it hard to find a place for in my everyday life.

I was confronted with poverty on a different level than I had seen before in the United States and a story like one in

particular where there was a bed in the middle of the hut that was already crowded and small,

shared by grandparents and their granddaughter. And when I asked the teenage granddaughter why the bed was in the middle of the room, she said it was where her grandmother slept, so her grandfather wouldn't get up in the middle of the night and molest her. Her grandmother would protect her by sleeping in the middle of the room like that. It was truly heartbreaking, but these were the kinds of stories that I would hear as I was over there,

as poverty and molestation often go hand in hand. When I came back, I remember just kind of wanting

to lie around and not work and just think about these things. And so in my prayer time one day,

the Lord really nudged me not to become so affected that I became

ineffective. And I realized the way I was processing my angst over things was actually

blocking me from being able to tell stories to touch people's hearts and move people to action

and even help myself from moving forward in some positive action.

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