Dear friend,
I want to tell you what happened in my prayer time this morning.
I was on my knees before sunrise the way I have been every morning for fifty years. My Bible was open. The room was quiet. And I was reading a passage I have read more times than I can count.
And then I stopped.
Not because the words were new. I have known these words for decades. I stopped because someone came into my mind so clearly that I could not keep reading. Someone I have never met. Someone whose name I do not know. But someone I recognized immediately.
I believe that someone is you.
Let me tell you who I am talking about.
You used to pray every day.
Not perfectly. Not always for long. But you talked to God the way you talk to someone you know. You opened your Bible. You showed up. It was not always easy but it was consistent and it was real and it was yours.
And then somewhere along the way, without any single moment you could point to, it got quieter.
Maybe life got harder and prayer started to feel like one more thing you did not have the energy for. Maybe you prayed for something specific for a long time and the answer never came the way you hoped and the silence wore you down. Maybe you just drifted. The way a boat drifts from a dock when nobody is holding the rope. Slowly. Without drama. Until one day you looked up and realized how far you had gone.
You have not told anyone. It feels too private. And if you are honest, it feels a little shameful. Because you know better. You have always known better. And yet here you are.
That is who I was thinking about this morning. And I could not shake it.
The passage I was reading when you came into my mind is in Lamentations chapter 3. It was written by a man named Jeremiah, and he wrote it at the lowest point of his life. His city had been destroyed. Everything he had prayed for and worked for and believed in had collapsed around him. And he wrote with a rawness that still reaches across three thousand years.
He wrote in verse 17 — I have been deprived of peace. I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say my splendour is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord.
He was not performing. He was not trying to sound faithful. He was saying plainly — I have lost my hope. I do not know where it went. But it is gone.
And then, just a few lines later, in verse 22, he wrote something that I believe is one of the most important sentences in the entire Bible.
Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed. For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning.
Read that again.
They are new every morning.
Not new when you deserve them. Not new when you have been consistent enough or faithful enough or disciplined enough to earn them. New every morning. Without condition. Without memory of yesterday. Without a record of how long you have been away.
Jeremiah went from I have lost all hope to His mercies are new every morning in the space of five verses. Not because his circumstances changed. Because he remembered something true that his grief had temporarily buried.
That is what I want for you this morning.
I am not going to tell you that prayer is easy. It is not always easy. I have been doing it for fifty years and there are mornings when it feels like I am talking to a ceiling. I know what it is to kneel down and feel nothing and stay anyway. I know what it is to pray for something for years and not understand the silence.
But I also know this.
The drift is never final. The distance is never too great. The mercy is genuinely new every morning, which means it is new this morning, which means it is new right now, at whatever time you are reading this, wherever you are.
You do not need to explain where you have been. You do not need to have a plan for how things will be different going forward. You just need to start again. Today. This morning if you still can. Tomorrow morning if today is already gone.
God has not moved. He has simply been waiting with the patience that only Someone who exists outside of time can have.
I want to leave something else in your hands before I close.
So many of you have written to me about the fear that sits underneath the drift. Not just the personal drift from prayer, but the larger drift — the feeling that the country you love, the values you have held your whole life, the man you believe God has placed at the centre of this moment — that all of it is slipping away faster than you can hold onto it.
I wrote a guide that speaks directly to that fear. It is called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. I wrote it for the same reason Jeremiah kept writing even when he could not feel God's presence — because the truth does not stop being true just because we cannot feel it right now. The pattern I describe in that guide is real whether or not you can feel it in this season. And sometimes seeing the pattern clearly is what brings the feeling back.
You can find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Go into this week knowing that the mercy is new.
Not new because you earned it. New because that is simply what it is. Every morning. Without exception. Including this one.
God bless you, friend. I am glad this morning's prayer found its way to you.
With you in prayer,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do two things:
One. Read Lamentations chapter 3, verses 1 through 26. Read the whole thing. Do not skip to verse 22. You need to read what came before it to understand what it cost Jeremiah to get there. Let it give you permission to be honest with God about where you actually are before you tell Him where you want to be.
Two. If you have been drifting — not just from prayer but from hope about this country and what God is doing in it — read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump I believe it will give you something solid to stand on when the feeling is hard to find.