Without Hurt, We Would Never Know Hope.
Our deepest hurt is also where our greatest hope emerges. While we experience pain and loss, those circumstances are also the fertile soil for new beginnings. For new life. For a new day.
We just need to look over and past that hurt to see it. Not ignore it but rise above it.
Hope Is An Invitation
Hope is an invitation to trust God in spite of how we feel. It can only exist in the unseen things. Hope and trust go hand in hand.
God wants to take us beyond our present hurt to something greater; something lasting.
Our hope is anchored in him, and the Lord is good and He has good things for us. Maybe this is what hurt does. The depth of our hurt enables us to know the depth of hope and life forever with God. This “living hope” that is ours because Jesus is alive? It is a gift no one can take away from us.
We have a choice when we are facing difficult situations. We can choose hope because we trust God has a better view or we can choose despair because we believe God has abandoned us — or never cared to begin with. To put our hope and trust in God, we must know Him. The way we know Him is by reading the Scriptures devotedly and deeply.
Hope Offers Us New Beginnings
Hope offers us new beginnings. Suffering gives us a new purpose. Storms may lead to new relationships that didn’t exist before. And trials can create in us new dreams. We know it might seem impossible to envision right now. We know there may be things we’ve lost that we’ll never get back. But biblical hope enables us to see differently
Hope reminds us that our current reality is not our final reality.
Our hope is transforming our hurt as we look forward to God’s return.
Hope Holds Us in the Dark
Hope isn’t just something we hold on to in the dark; hope holds us when we feel surrounded by the dark. And what we are noticing in our own hearts is a new longing. Something God wants for us. And something he gives to us when he meets us in our chaos. A longing for home.
For heaven.
Our joy and hope, if it is to sustain us, can never be in how our trials turn out, but who our trials lead us to.
If not for hope, we’d stay there, convinced that the way it is must be the way it is.
Hope transforms our hurt into patient waiting. It enables us to see through the tears to what is coming, to what we are really searching for. One of the ways God changes us in our weeping is by helping us to long for the home that will last. The home that is not behind us but ahead of us.
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