Keep your chin up

So everyone in this world experiences highs and lows in life. Its inevitable and if you think otherwise, you need to stop kidding yourself, or come out from under that rock you have been living under. Life in this world is a roller coaster emotionally, physically, and most importantly spiritually. We go through periods where things are going great in our personal lives like we have a great boyfriend or girlfriend, our job is really great (or we find a job), our grades are good, and our relationships with our families are great. However, there are also periods where we go through crap. Pure crap.We are lonely and feel as though no one will ever love us, we are financially in trouble and unemployed, we have familial struggles, and so on and so on. Those times can feel hopeless. I am here to tell you though that in any situation, bad and good, we can have hope.

If there is one thing that I think most Christians can agree on, its that God is here for us no matter what. That right there SHOULD be all I need to say about this. I should be able to just leave it at that, wish you all a good evening, and let you all look forward to the next time I post something. However, its easy for us to accept that as a good enough reason to cheer up for about 5.38 seconds, then we feel insecure again. We humans are so focused on the tangible things. God is with us always? Oh well that's GREAT! ....Where is he? I don't see him....

However, if you read the Bible, and you might have to go skim through what it says again, it teaches nothing BUT hope for us. There are tons of stories about people who literally went through Hell on Earth. They experienced pain and agony and fear and abandonment. However, they were never left on their own and in the end, God would rescue them. Job I think is a great example of this. He was utterly destroyed. Everything taken away from him. His family, is property, everything he owned was taken from him. HOWEVER, Job remained faithful knowing that God does not back down from his promises and will always bless his people and deliver them. Pretty great example of how we should face the hard times in our life too.

I want to point out though as well that we are to have hope still in the good times as well. "Hunter, its so easy to do that." Sure, you might think that. Hope in God is very closely related to your faith. Our hope is in Christ and by having faith in him, we are to remember him in all things, good and bad. However, I have seen in both my life and others, that when things are going well in our lives, we tend to forget where these blessings come from and even sometimes that they are blessings, not anything we earned by our own doing. When things are going well, we need to understand that God is giving us the blessings and giving us a time of prosperity, and we therefore need to keep hope in God that his promise of giving us infinitely more in Heaven is still true. It may seem like you could be perfectly happy living like that in those times, but comparatively to Heaven, you have no idea what joy even means! So continue to have faith that God's promises of eternal joy are more than just the happiness we can find on Earth.

We are to keep finding our hope in God through Jesus Christ both in the hard times by knowing that God redeems his people and calls them out of the darkness, but also we are to keep seeing the hope in him in the good by knowing that his promise means so much more than temporary earthly joy. As Christians, it is so important not to get complacent in the good times or to feel as though God is not a part of our good times. Everything we have is from him. We have done nothing to earn our blessings or good fortune. Keep the hope that he will stick to his promise of eternal joy in his presence.

My prayer for you is that your hope in God is renewed today and that you recognize your worth. God will never forsake you, and he will never let you settle for the earthly happiness when he has so much more prepared for you in Heaven. I pray that you seem him more and more each day and feel him guiding you more and more along his will.