Here’s what stayed with me from my conversation with Sarah E. Frazer after the recording ended. It was not flashy, not dramatic in the worldly sense, not the sort of thing that trends. It was something quieter and, for that reason, perhaps more important.
She described what it was like to be awake in the night, struggling with anxiety and depression, unable to sleep, and to have her husband turn on the light and begin reading a psalm aloud.
Not offering a technique.
Not trying to win an argument.
Not delivering a pep talk.
Just reading the words of scripture into the darkness.
From that experience came not only deepened faith, but actual work: Sarah’s podcast, Psalms to Help You Sleep, and now her forthcoming devotional book, He Is With Me Through the Night, which grows naturally out of the same terrain. Her earlier book, I Didn’t Sign Up for This: How to Rest in God’s Goodness When Your Story Shifts, provides the broader frame: the life we thought we were entering gives way to another life, one we did not plan, one we would not have selected from the catalog, and yet one in which God must somehow still be found.
That struck me because it gets at something many modern believers, for all our resources and sophistication, still resist admitting: there are times when the soul is too tired for analysis. There are times when the best theology in the room is not the most intricate, but the most inhabitable. A psalm in the night. A voice reading truth when your own mind will not cooperate. A reminder that God is not absent simply because darkness feels thick.
Sarah made the point beautifully that the Psalms do not shy away from darkness. They are not embarrassed by fear, delay, confusion, or the repeated human cry of How long? They are full of night language. They are full of the uneasy middle. And because they are, they remain usable.
That, to me, is more than a comforting devotional insight. It is a clue to reality itself. We are not sustained merely by explanations. We are sustained by speech that comes from within - in response to the condition we find ourselves in.
From there, several other takeaways from my interview with Sarah came into focus.
1. Faith becomes real when it becomes chosen
One of the most important parts of Sarah’s story was not the crisis itself, but what preceded it.
She grew up in a Christian home in Appalachia, homeschooled, formed from an early age by scripture, church, and a stable devotional environment. Then she went to a secular college and had to confront what many people eventually confront in one form or another: not merely What have I been taught? but What do I myself believe?
I appreciated her honesty here. She did not dramatize the process unnecessarily. She did not describe it as a total collapse or a rebellious rejection. It was more subtle than that, and therefore perhaps more universal. She came to see that she had a choice. Her parents could not choose for her. Her church could not choose for her. She had to decide whether faith would become her own.
That is a vital transition in any serious spiritual life.
There is a difference between being carried along by a current and holding fast to our conviction. The former may be a gift; the latter is a responsibility. And yet I was especially struck by the way she described her parents and church as making room for questions without shaming her for asking them. That is no small thing. Too often religious communities confuse inquiry with betrayal and create the very brittle faith they later lament.
What emerged in Sarah’s case was not the abandonment of belief, but its deepening. The faith that would later sustain her in suffering had already passed through the test of choice.
2. Sometimes we say yes to God in principle and then discover the actual assignment was much harder
Sarah’s adoption story is where this becomes concrete.
She and her husband felt called to adopt internationally from China. They said yes. They moved forward in obedience. And then, after bringing home their daughter, they found themselves in a reality they had not fully anticipated, especially regarding the severity and complexity of the child’s special needs.
This is where the title I Didn’t Sign Up for This lands with such force.
Of course, at one level, she did sign up for adoption. That is precisely the point. She signed up for what she understood. What she did not sign up for was the unchosen excess, the overflow, the version of the story that arrived with dimensions she could neither predict nor manage in advance.
That is true far beyond adoption.
People say yes to marriage, but not to betrayal.
Yes to parenthood, but not to diagnosis.
Yes to vocation, but not to collapse.
Yes to mission, but not to pandemic isolation in a foreign country two months after arrival.
One of the strengths of Sarah’s witness is that she does not flatten any of this into cliché. She does not pretend difficulty means God was not in it. Nor does she suggest that calling exempts us from disorientation. Rather, she bears witness to the fact that obedience may lead directly into conditions that force faith to grow roots.
That, as I heard it, was one of her great themes: there may not be much visible fruit in winter, but something is happening under the surface.
3. Peace is not a destination but a daily provision
This was perhaps Sarah’s most quotable insight, but it is more than a quotable line. It is a corrective to a profound spiritual error.
She said that for much of her life, especially as a planner, she wanted a plan. She wanted to know how things would go, how to prepare, how to solve, how to move forward. But in the crucible of caring for her daughter, and later in other upheavals, she came to see that what God was giving her was not a plan in the sense she wanted.
What He was giving was peace for today.
Not five years of peace.
Not a map of the entire journey.
Not a warranty against future pain.
Enough peace for this day.
Her image of a “coffee cup of peace” was simple and memorable. You have enough for this morning. Tomorrow’s cup will come tomorrow.
That is difficult teaching for people like me, and perhaps for many of my readers, because we confuse understanding with security. We would like to believe that if we can interpret the pattern correctly, we can finally rest. But Sarah’s testimony points in another direction. Peace is not the reward for having deciphered the whole plot. It is a provision that arrives while the plot is still unresolved.
There is deep biblical resonance in that. Daily bread, not annual stockpiles. Manna, not hoarding. Light for the step at hand, not floodlighting for the entire wilderness.
4. God’s goodness and God’s sovereignty must be held together
This was, in my view, one of the strongest theological formulations in our conversation.
Sarah said that God’s sovereignty by itself is only partly comforting. If God is in control but not good, then His power offers little consolation. On the other hand, the goodness of God by itself is also only partly comforting. If He is kind but not truly governing events, then we are left with sentiment but not security.
Both must be held together.
This matters because suffering distorts instinct. In pain, we often swing toward one error or the other. Either we imagine God as powerful but remote, ordaining things without tenderness, or we imagine Him as loving but somehow standing helplessly on the sidelines while events overtake us.
Sarah’s point was that Christian faith refuses both reductions.
The God who meets us in the dark is not merely sympathetic. He is sovereign.
And the God who rules is not merely efficient. He is good.
That is not an easy doctrine. It does not dissolve mystery. But it does preserve relationship. It gives us grounds not only to submit, but to trust.
5. The Psalms remain because they tell the truth about the life we are actually living
Let me return where I began, because in some ways all the other takeaways converge here.
Sarah’s work around the Psalms matters because it is grounded in lived necessity. She did not arrive at this by branding strategy. She arrived there because, in the middle of the night, the Psalms proved inhabitable. They could carry fear, insomnia, sadness, uncertainty, and longing without lying about any of them.
That is what scripture does at its best. It does not merely describe ideal states. It speaks into actual conditions.
And the Psalms, perhaps more than any other portion of scripture, grant language for the in-between:
when the answer has not come,
when the story has shifted,
when the future is hidden,
when the body will not rest,
when the questions keep circling,
when faith itself is less like triumph and more like breathing through the night.
Sarah’s life and work are a reminder that there is no shame in needing such language. There is wisdom in it.
If you have not encountered her work, I would encourage you to explore it: I Didn’t Sign Up for This, her podcast Psalms to Help You Sleep, and the forthcoming devotional He Is With Me Through the Night. Each arises from the same core conviction: God’s presence is not canceled by disappointment, and His word remains alive even when we are too weary to do much more than listen.
That, in the end, may be one of the deepest truths of the Christian life.
Sometimes we do not need a grand solution. We need a light turned on in the dark. We need a voice reading a psalm. We need enough peace for today. We need to remember that faith becomes our own not when it is never tested, but when it is chosen. And we need to know that the God who governs the story is also good enough to be trusted within it.
And because these conversations are never really about one guest alone, but about the larger search for truth, healing, faith, and what it means to live as those created in the image of God, I want to invite you to stay with me for what is coming next on Created in the Image of God.
On Sunday, August 30 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Michael Ward—theologian, literary scholar, and one of the leading experts on C.S. Lewis. We’ll explore the imagination, theology, and hidden depths of Lewis’s work, and why his stories continue to resonate so powerfully with readers today. From The Chronicles of Narnia to the larger cosmos of Lewis’s thought, it promises to be a rich conversation about the ways literature can illuminate faith in unexpected ways.
Then on Tuesday, September 1 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Kelly Edmonston—pastor, author, and speaker—for a conversation about how Christians can move beyond shame and silence into more honest engagement around faith, identity, and sexuality. We’ll talk about the long-held expectations that often bind people unnecessarily, and about the greater freedom, healing, and wholeness that grace makes possible.
If this conversation with Sarah stirred something in you—about darkness, waiting, scripture, peace, or the slow work of learning to trust God when life goes off script—I think these next two conversations will extend that journey in meaningful ways. One turns toward imagination and literary vision. The other toward honesty, grace, and the difficult work of freedom. Both, in their own way, belong to the same road.
