For the World You Don’t Want to Live In

When the world feels overwhelming, prayer becomes our power and our refuge.

Welcome to The Resilient Series—a collection of reflections from wise, faith-filled voices exploring what it means to live resilient in Jesus. Each week, we’ll hear from a different writer—authors, pastors, coaches, neurosurgeons, and everyday disciples—sharing their stories, Scripture insights, and hard-won hope. Whether you’re arriving here at the start or joining partway through, each piece stands alone and invites you to draw near to the God who strengthens us through every season.

This week, Christina Lynn Wallace challenges us to reconsider where true resilience begins. In a world saturated with violence, chaos, and constant online noise, it can feel impossible to maintain hope or respond with grace. But Christina reminds us that the antidote to despair isn’t more content creation, clever commentary, or self-reliance—it’s prayer. Deep, intentional, surrendered prayer. Prayer that aligns our hearts with God’s Kingdom, transforms our perspective, and equips the Church to be a force of holiness, justice, and hope in a broken world.

All I have to do is pick up my phone, and my living room transforms from a sanctuary into a prison.

News headlines are just the beginning. PTSD is a thumb-tap away, followed by the onslaught of voices responding to the trauma — and bidding you to do the same.

We were never designed to universally witness, from the privacy of our homes, the kind of violence that permanently alters the psyche of war veterans from the trenches. We were never created to be so numb to death that our knee-jerk reaction when we witness a murder on our screens is to post opinion pieces and Facebook statuses and Instagram stories and Substack notes mere hours after it happened.

I wonder, sometimes, in a world where it is now commonplace to respond to tragedy with content (no matter how well-meaning or thoughtfully created), how much further can we stray from Eden?

This is not a world that I want to live in — not a world that I want the Church to feed into. I do not want to become so shaped by the content-production machine that I am more adept at building platforms than I am at falling to my knees.

I’m an Oxford theology student. It goes against my nature to define anything as “simple.” Generally speaking, I tend to thrive in dissecting the complexity of arguments and debates, and I bristle at over-simplifications. But in this situation, I know in the very marrow of my bones that there is a shockingly simple solution that will help us escape the dark labyrinth of social media, secondhand trauma, vitriolic keyboard warriors, unfeeling opinion pieces, panic-inducing pressure to speak up, deafening noise, and hopeless despair.

Prayer. Prayer in isolation. Prayer in community. Just prayer. Honest, humble, and true.

The problem is that the term “thoughts and prayers” has been so unfeelingly spewed across the internet that it has turned into a cliché devoid of all meaning. Even we, as Christians, say we’re praying for someone — but we don’t always actually do it. Because we’re tired, and the world is on fire, and we don’t know where to start anymore.

But when I say that prayer is our escape route out of this labyrinth, I am not referring to the cliché, internet-ised notion of prayer. For too long, we’ve hid behind the phrase “I’ll pray for you” while secretly allowing ourselves to be sucked ever-deeper into despair — so deep that we, the hands and feet of God, have forgotten that prayer actually has power to cause seismic waves of real change in the world.

Prayer is THE battle cry. Prayer raises up kings and brings down tyrants. Prayer thwarts the enemy. Prayer turns hearts. Prayer ignites perfect justice and covers in perfect love. Prayer bids us to lay down our content, our opinions, our lives, even our ability to string a sentence together, and invites us instead to bow before the throne and ask the Holy Spirit to speak God’s will THROUGH us.

• Prayer says “YOUR Kingdom come. YOUR will be done.”

• Prayer says “I am YOUR conduit for holiness and goodness and beauty and truth.”

• Prayer says “I have direct access to the King of all kings.”

• Prayer says “I believe in eternity.”

• Prayer says “There are things too grand and glorious for me to know.”

• Prayer says “I believe in a future of a world I want to live in.”

• Prayer says “I fix my eyes on Truth, and I will not surrender my hope.”

When’s the last time that you put your phone in another room and fell to your knees, surrendering your own original ideas, giving up your need to contrive your own prayers, and instead cried out the laments of the Psalms of David or the liturgies of the early Church fathers and mothers?

When’s the last time that you asked God to align your thoughts with His so that you might pray not based on your own political leanings or personal feelings but based on the refreshing freedom of surrendering to His glorious will?

When’s the last time that you truly believed that your prayers matter?

A year ago, my prayer life felt dead. I had given up believing that my prayers made any difference, either in the world or in my own personal relationship with God. I couldn’t muster up prayers for others or for myself. So I gave God the only prayer I had left: I asked Him to renew my prayer life.

My prayer life is now unrecognisable. For an hour each morning, I fall into the cooling, sacred stream of liturgy, no longer exhausted as I search for my own words but filled with hope as I bind my heart to Christ’s.

And I am seeing prayers answered in a way that I’ve never seen in my 30+ years as a Christian. The world on my phone is clothed in darkness, but in my own life, I am seeing miracles so stunning that I can’t help but shout it from the rooftops and remind the Church of this single truth: dear one, your prayers are incredibly powerful when you fall to your knees and allow your King to guide you out of the labyrinth.

I am so utterly convinced that our resilience as a Church will be marked by the countercultural response of praying more than we post. By standing firm on the truth that His Kingdom is coming now, even though it feels like the world is on fire. By abiding in hope as we speak out the will of the Father, waiting patiently for the cosmic waves that will, in His perfect timing, transform this earth into our Home.

If you feel exhausted by the constant storm of news, opinions, and online outrage, remember this: resilience is nurtured in the quiet act of kneeling. It’s in surrendering your thoughts, laying down your need to “do it all,” and letting God guide your prayers that the Church is strengthened, the world is touched, and hope rises. When we pray more than we post, when we bow in humility instead of shouting from the rooftops, we tap into a power far greater than our own: the God who makes His Kingdom come, even in the midst of darkness. Start today—put your phone aside, fall to your knees, and watch God work miracles through your prayers.

Next week is a guest post from Megan J. Conner.