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. So we're talking about how God helps us

maneuver some more difficult areas of our everyday life. Yesterday, we talked about our work,

our jobs, and dealing with work

we don't necessarily love. And today I want us to get into how God helps heal our hurts

and our hearts and helps us move on from church junk. It's a problem for many of us, and I want to

talk about it.

Recently, a person I would consider, probably more of a colleague than a friend,

asked on Twitter, if you've not quit the church, especially after you've been hurt,

why did you choose to stay?

I've talked through some of that on here already, but I want to get down to it and pull it apart

a little. I answered that colleague on Twitter, you know, that sort of public, private

convoy Twitter is. And here was my take and is my take on this thing. That yes, the church

has hurt me, but that doesn't give me a reason nor a right to throw out what God has ordained.

So the system is broken because we've broken it, not because the ordination of church

community, the body of Christ, isn't right or viable.

God created the right thing for us, but we're imperfect, so we mess it up, and that, by the way,

includes me. For me to hate the church or be mad at the church would be for me to deny that I, too,

have not hurt people as well because I'm the church. We as believers all are. And so when I look at it

from the lens that it's a broken

system to a degree because imperfect humans like myself broke it, but it's still perfect

...