Hello, friends. My heart is a little heavy today. In thinking about waves of life, sometimes I get a little discouraged, so my heart is weighing me down today. I hope I am finding you well, dear friends. Here I am to bear my heart to you, hoping that at least one single person will be helped by my vulnerability. Please feel free to comment with any questions, thoughts, grievances, or whatever you desire. If one of you, dear friends, is encouraged, I have succeeded.
Sometimes, in life, hard things happen. If you’ve been alive longer than a year (or a few months… or days…), I imagine you have had something difficult, or relatively difficult happen in your life. We all have struggles and we all have pain. One person’s doesn’t negate another, even if it seems lesser to us. Your struggles and your pain are very real and very real to you, I’m certain.
Sometimes, in life, many hard things happen. One after another after another. Like waves of the ocean, they continue to come and they don’t stop.
You can’t fend off a wave. No matter how hard you struggle, it is more powerful than you, small human as you are. Your feeble arms can not fight off its strength. It can consume you.
So it can be in life. Not always, but it can be. We can feel like we are being hit with one difficult thing after another after another. You are sick for months. You give birth to a miserable baby. You become depressed. You get sick for a few more months. You end up in the hospital. Your mom dies. Your friend dies. You start having panic attacks… do you get it? It can feel like one terrible thing after another with no relief. No reprieve. No rest. You keep treading the waves and you try not to be pulled under and drown.
So… we can’t fight off waves, so how can we keep from drowning? We are pulled under. We start to drown. We can’t think and our chest gets tight as we begin to fight for air. We have no hope for survival…
But don’t we?
Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Yes, this man. Fully God and fully man, Christ is our hope for survival. The only one, true hope.
“What…? How? Why? Just why?”
Let me tell you, my dear, dear friend. All on our own, we have no reprieve because what is weighing us down and pulling us under the waves of circumstance is our sin. Yes sin. This word, sin, does not merely represent the breaking of arbitrary moral rules. Sin is anything that does not come out of faith in God. Sin is action, motive, thought that is contrary to God and His character. We all sin. Everyday. All of us. All of the days.
“OK, so what’s the point? This is really negative…”
On the contrary, my dear! Yes, we live without faith, even though God created us and deserves our trust in Him and our love. Yes, our hearts are tainted with hatred and lust and anger and pride and many other things that God calls evil. We all suffer. BUT God had a plan. Not a plan to give us our “best life now” nor to help us “be the best we can be”. Not even necessarily to pull us out of all the waves. His plan is to give us eternal life. He gives us new, clean hearts to love him. Not to control or brainwash or any other nonsense. To love. He gives us the gift of love! He calls us to love Him, we can’t do it, so he gives it to us as a free gift! What?! More importantly than our love for him, He loves us. In First John, in God’s Word, it says “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Because we rebel against God, do what he hates, and have sin in our hearts, we have earned righteous anger from God, death, and eternal death. But, God sends Christ into our broken existence, who bore our sin in His body, for God’s glory, and he saves us from what we have earned. He felt the separation from God that we deserve. He took on the waves, and he survived. Christ died on a wooden cross for people who hated him, ignored him, and took him for granted. People who spat on him, beat him, and wouldn’t even look at him. He rose again, from the grave. Yes, rose from the dead. ALIVE. AGAIN. Fully alive. Out of the waves. He promised that he would return, make us whole and make all things new.
His plan can give us hope. Why? Because, in Christ, we have the hope of eternal life, whole, without sin, without pain. In John, in God’s Word, it says, “This is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and the One You have sent—Jesus Christ.”
“OK, so who cares? What good is eternal life? How does that help me now??”
My friend, it helps you greatly. It is most important. Hope helps you now. God loves the people he created. He is compassionate. He gives us the hope of eternal life with him. Forever. No more tears. No more suffering. No more pain. No more sickness. No more depression. No more death. No more evil. Only goodness, love, peace, wholeness, holiness. We have hope because, in the waves, God is there. He is there, calling us to see Him and trust Him. He knows the waves and He doesn’t fear them. He has faced them and He has won. We have hope because the waves are temporary, even if they don’t stop coming. They will not last forever. You will, if you trust in Him. God will.
This, my dear friend, this is temporary.
P.S. We also hope in promises kept:
13 For when God made a promise to Abraham, since He had no one greater to swear by, He swore by Himself:
14 I will indeed bless you,
and I will greatly multiply you.
15 And so, after waiting patiently, Abraham obtained the promise. 16 For men swear by something greater than themselves, and for them a confirming oath ends every dispute. 17 Because God wanted to show His unchangeable purpose even more clearly to the heirs of the promise, He guaranteed it with an oath, 18 so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us. 19 We have this hope as an anchor for our lives, safe and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain. 20 Jesus has entered there on our behalf as a forerunner, because He has become a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.
She Endeavors 