Hope Endures

This week has been a difficult one, embedded with twists and turns, confusion and pain, stress and weariness...Reality has hit and awakened me from my fantasies and has shown me what is real and true. Although this is a magnificent aspect and allows me to move forward with my life, heartache and sorrow must first be overcome.

When my heart feels as if it open and exposed, lying on the ground, waiting for the next person to come over and stomp on it, God sends encouragement and hope to lift my broken heart up and make it whole once again. I am amazed by His awesome power and by the way in which He works through others. When I feel great despair and contain hopeless feelings God uses someone to encourage me and show me that I am loved. The timing of God is amazing and I am so very grateful for the people that He has placed in my life. He fills me up when I feel empty. He uses

His people to reach out to the hurting and helps them realize that there is hope.

He has greatly blessed His people and loves every single one of them. It is important to live in a way that demonstrates His wonderful love, mercy, and grace and pour all of these aspects out to all people.

He gives us strength in our weakness and provides us with hope to carry on. He loves His people unconditionally and it would be a beautiful thing to see everyone connected and pouring out this miraculous love to each other. God is so good and He is always here. He provides us with everything that we need and will be with us every single step of the way. So with this great love and joy that comes from Him alone, we must go and love others as He loves us.

Lamentations 3:17-24

"I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, 'My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord.' I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself 'The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.'"

Our Hope Endures

Natalie Grant

"You would think only so much can go wrong

Calamity only strikes once

And you assume that this one has suffered her share

Life will be kinder from here

Sometimes the sun stays hidden for years

Sometimes the sky rains night after night

When will it clear

But our hope endures the worst of conditions

It's more than our optimism

Let earth quake

Our hope is unchanged

How do we comprehend peace within pain

Our joy at a good man's wake

Walk a mile with a woman whose body is torn

With illness but she marches on

Sometimes the sun stays hidden for years

Sometimes the sky rains night after night

When will it clear

But our hope endures the worst of conditions

It's more than our optimism

Let earth quake

Our hope is unchanged

Emanuel God is with us

El Shaddai, all sufficient

Emanuel God is with us

El Shaddai, all sufficient...

We never walk alone

This is our hope..."