Verse & Vision | June 1, 2026

Verse of the Day – June 1, 2026

Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God! I will praise him again — my Savior and my God. — Psalm 42:11

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This is the fourth time in five days that the verse of the day (which are randomly generated, and taken from the Bible app, every morning) has been personal. Yet again it is beyond spot on for where I am, what I need. It couldn’t be more perfect for the experience I’m having in life. The post based on it deserves a detour from the routine, so that’s what I am going to share today – not as a rant or a grievance, but as an example.

I can’t get over how tangibly present God and the Holy Spirit have been in my life lately. It’s as though the spiritual energy around me is screaming, “Here I am!!!” for weeks now. But it’s not always like that. And even sometimes, when it is, we might still find ourselves struggling. I have been, especially in recent days.

We can know God is with us and that He works on our behalf when we walk in His ways, and still sometimes move through days feeling unseen, unheard, and utterly alone. This weekend especially has been one of those times for me. It’s been a battle. I’m tired. And I feel myself beginning to run on not just physical but mental and emotional fumes.

For the last I don’t know how many nights, if I’m honest, I’ve spent hours hunting for help for my autistic son through a system that seems designed to confuse and exhaust the people it’s supposed to serve. For months, I’ve waited. I’ve taken what I’ve been told with a grain of salt. But, due to specific circumstances, there’s no more time to wait on other people to do what they said they were going to do – and especially what they claim, and get paid, to do.

Not unlike the days with my mom and Medicaid, or my closest dying friends and their cancer policies/lack of support using them – sometimes not even being taken seriously in their oncology appointments and needing an advocate, I’ve sat everywhere from my desk to my bed to my kitchen table, at all hours of the day and night, with tabs open and my hope chipped down to a thin, sharp edge, feeling like a failure as a wife, a mother, a teacher, a creative, and even as a woman.

The truth I hold in my bones, that God is faithful and that I have proof of that, doesn’t erase the real, gritty grief of caring for someone whose needs are constant and whose voice is mostly absent, for example – or of being mostly physically alone in doing it because the systems that are supposed to help you are just… not present. They exist, but they don’t show up.

Because he can’t speak, I speak it out loud for him. It’s not to complain or to wallow, but to keep resentment from calcifying into something worse. I channel it into advocacy for him, and for myself. I channel bold truths about authenticity and the shadows of these systems into Authenticity Unveiled posts, and big emotions into artwork meant to encourage people by helping them see the reality they’re mistaking for something it’s not – to see it for what it actually is, especially when it’s uncomfortable.

That’s the only way to overcome any challenge: to be brutally honest, to sit with that truth, and to speak it even when we tremble and shake. On every day I succeed by surviving, I want to pay that hope forward.

But that phrase, “I speak it out loud,” is older in my spirit than I consciously realized… until I started researching today’s verse of the day.

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The Psalmist Knew This Place

Psalm 42 was written by the sons of Korah, temple musicians and gatekeepers who composed some of Scripture’s most honest and searching prayers. This psalm reads less like a hymn and more like someone talking themselves back from the edge. The psalmist isn’t performing peace. He’s arguing with his own soul.

Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad?

He asks it not once but three times across Psalms 42 and 43 – which were likely one continuous poem, divided later. He is thirsty for God the way a deer pants for water. He is mocked by people who say, Where is your God now? He remembers the days when he felt close to the presence, when worship came easily… and he can’t find his way back there, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise.

What he does instead is quietly radical: he talks to his own heart. Why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you in turmoil within me?

He names the state he’s in. He doesn’t spiritualize it away or rush to a chorus. He sits with the question.

And then, though not because the circumstances changed, he pivots.

I will put my hope in God. I will praise him again.

That word again is doing a lot of work. It implies: not yet. It implies there was a before, and there will be an after. It holds the door of expectation open without pretending the night is already over.

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What Advocacy Grief Feels Like

If you haven’t navigated systems on behalf of a person with terminal illness, or a child with a disability, it’s hard to explain what it does to you. It isn’t one big blow. It’s a thousand small ones.

It’s a form that leads to a phone number that leads to a voicemail that’s been full since 2019. It’s a program that exists in theory with a three-year waitlist. It’s a website last updated before your child could tie his shoes. And through all of it, you’re supposed to be the calm, persistent expert – especially when they know your educational and career background includes psychology and teaching – while inside you’re just a mother at a kitchen table at midnight wondering what you missed and what you should have started sooner.

This is a real grief. It doesn’t get much air. It doesn’t look like loss from the outside. But it is a slow and ongoing kind of mourning – for the ease you hoped for, for the child you’re still learning to understand, for the version of yourself who thought love would be enough to open the right doors.

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Speaking It Out Loud

I’ve learned, slowly and imperfectly, that naming the hard thing is not the same as losing faith. In fact, the psalm suggests the opposite. Swallowing the discouragement and calling it peace is truly how resentment quietly takes root. The psalmist didn’t harden. He spoke.

There’s something in us – especially those of us shaped by faith environments that quietly equated suffering with spiritual failure – that wants to skip to the resolution. We want to say “but God” too quickly and paper over the wound before it can breathe.

The psalmist doesn’t do that. He waits. He lets himself be in the middle. He asks the real question. And somewhere in the asking, he finds not a tidy answer but a direction: put your hope in God. Not because the night ended or because the forms got easier or the phone got answered, but because He is still my Savior. He is still my God.

That’s where I’m landing tonight. I’m not at resolution, but at orientation. My face is turned toward the right thing, even while my heart is still tired.

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Closing Thoughts

If you’re in the middle of something that doesn’t resolve neatly – advocacy, caregiving, waiting, loss, confusion, conflict, and grief that has no clean edges – I hope you’ll let yourself ask the honest questions, and receive the honest answers, too. And I hope you find, as the psalmist did, that asking it to God is itself a form of trust.

I will put my hope in God. I will praise him again.

Even still. Even now.