Daring to Hope: Finding God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful

When we cannot find joy in our circumstances, we can find joy in God who is unchanged and unchanging. We can rejoice, not in what is going on around or within us, but because God is our strength and He will continue to be.

And the more I knew my feebleness, my flaws, and my shortcomings, the more I knew His gentleness toward me, His tender glance, His strong and loving shoulder that was always available to lean on.

Sometimes the things we would never pick for our lives gives us opportunities to receive God's provision, to see Him working in ways we otherwise might not experience.

God sees you and me in our pain and our brokenness. He sees you walking a difficult path when the sun goes down and your life is a far cry from that which you expected or dreamed up. He sees you, dear friend, when the ending of the story is not the one that you yearned for and your prayers seem unanswered and it all just feels like a bit of a mess. He wants to name these places The Lord Will Provide. In the places where you thought life might be easier, when you thought things might be different, when you thought you might be better, be more, God provides His Son who meets you and provides grace for your gaps and light in your darkness.

Slowly, I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t my productivity that God desired; it was my heart. It wasn’t my ministry God loved; it was me. God was glorified, is glorified, when we give Him our hearts, give Him ourselves, and faithfully do the thing right in front of us, no matter how small or trivial.

As time passes, I realize more and more how conditioned I have been to be ashamed of my weakness. Somehow it is okay to attend to the brokenness in the lives of others, but to admit to brokenness in our own homes, even in our own hearts? We have been told that this is downright embarrassing. What we know to be true, though, as we dig into Scripture, is that God is not ashamed of our weakness. He is not ashamed of it, because He can use even this to glorify Himself.

It is a brave thing to hope, to continue in hope, knowing that God might say yes but that He could say no, and choosing to praise Him anyway.

This is the sin of the Israelites, of all humankind really, this slowness to remember all that He has done as we stare intently at what He hasn't done yet, what He might not do.

It is a bit of a mess, this business of love. As more and more people enter our lives, we are left with not choice but to enter theirs as well. Even more so, over time their pains become our pain and their joys become our joy and this sharing of the Gospel becomes a sharing of life. This, at first glance, seems so burdensome, so overwhelming, but somehow I have found it not to be any longer. Something about shouldering the burdens of another brings a lightness to our own affliction. We are in it together, and Christ is in it with us.

The angel had said to Mary, "Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!" And this blessing isn't always what we think- the happy ending we wanted and the desires of our hearts fulfilled.

Why had I believed my whole life that ease and success, gifts and miracles, smiling faces and my plans fulfilled, meant the Lord’s blessing and favor? The blessings also abound in the darkest night and the deepest valley, if we have eyes to see them. The invitation to experience sorrow and doubt and all those long nights with Him—that is favor.

At the end of time, all that will count is that we lived the Gospel with our very lives, that we paid attention to the people God gave us and dwelt knowledgeably and hospitably in the place to which He called us.

He may move you somewhere across the world. Or he may move you to believe again, to dare again, to reach out again. But if the steadying love of Christ moves you, it will move you out into the world with the bravest hope. He will move you to hope for what seem like impossible things, because His closeness is your most cherished thing.

I think that as humans, each of us just as lacking as the next, the most powerful thing we can do for another person is not to try to fix his or her pain or make it go away but to acknowledge it.

Too often we want clarity and God wants us to come closer.

Our hope is our offering to Him, our sacrifice. And in our hope, He is shaping us, molding us, drawing us to Him. We will now Him here, friend.

Hope is a crazy thing, a courageous thing. Faith is a bold, irrational choice.

I was learning that, ultimately, our hidden reach for God counts so much more than our public one. Some people might look at my life and say how amazing I am or what a radical Christian I am, just as some people might praise you because you appear to have it all together, but what really counts will be the quiet devotion practiced in our own homes. What will matter most at the end of our lives are these people right in front of us who get to see all of it, the happy stories and the tragic ones, the pretty-good parts of us and the ugliest parts of us. At the end of time, all that will count is that we lived the Gospel with our very lives, that we paid attention to the people God gave us and dwelt knowledgeably and hospitably in the place to which He called us.

God, who did not spare His own Son, will provide what we need, when we need it, even when we do not know what we need or that we need

I think of the privilege it is to be able to speak life over these hurting people and believe in new life for them as we strive to love them the way we've been loved by Christ, the privilege it is to watch His faithfulness unfold in their stories.

You are doing something great with your life—when you are doing all the small things with His great love. You are changing the world—when you are changing one person’s world. You aren’t missing your best life—when you aren’t missing opportunities to love like Christ.

As I’m tempted to wallow in guilt over all that I am not for my children, gently He points out that I was never meant to meet all their needs anyway. It isn’t me who can make up for all their losses and hurts. He reminds me that I cannot be what they need Him to be: Savior.

We both look at that leg and see so much more than new skin. We see Jesus. He met us right there on the cold, hard cement floor of my sunroom with our festering wounds and our messy hearts. He took two broken people and showed us the scars on His hands and whispered that it was okay if we had our scars too, because the scars were always meant to draw us into His glory.

You and I both know the truth of it: loving people is hard. It brings us to the very end of ourselves. And as much as we are trained to avoid it, the end of ourselves is such a very sweet place to be. The truth rings as clearly as it does for Mary in that moment at His feet: I am not sufficient. My parenting cannot be sufficient. Only He is sufficient and only He can fill up these holes, for all of us.

that God writes the better story. God sends the manna, all that we need, even when we do not understand it.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.

I think of the words of Proverbs that had caught my eye earlier this morning as I sipped coffee in the still-quiet house before life began: “To the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet.”1 Could it be? This is what He had been teaching me, even though I didn’t have the words yet. When I hunger always for Him, even the hard satisfies. Even the grief gives way to