Hello everyone! I am glad to be back from the chaos and clamor that is the season of spring on a farm, and I am excited to get to pick up my pen again, albeit in the form of a laptop keyboard. Since we are more than halfway through April already (where is the time going?!) I decided to put a pause on the monthly topic schedule I have had, and instead give you, my reader, a possibly unsought for look into the recent thoughts and meditations God planted in my heart and mind these past three weeks while He was keeping me too busy to blog. I apologize in advance to those of you who are understandably uninterested in what I muse on during the rough and tumble of every-day life, but I hope what I have to say is maybe a little encouraging, even a welcome break from your stressful schedule, though I know both of those hopes are a bit of a reach for a merely tolerable writer such as myself. Anyways, enough of my introduction.

Throughout my life, people have come and gone. Some of them merely because of school, moving, or other reasons that didn’t touch me deeply. Other people had the power over my heart to lead me to question my worth and distrust God’s plan for me when they left. I know I am not the only one who has ever experienced this, I’m not special in that way, but I do serve a special God who has helped me along the way, and I want to share that with you in case you are or ever have been in the same boat. Their departure made me ask questions like, “what is it about me that makes these people leave?”, “why am I not seemingly worth the time of day to them?”, or “what do I need to change about myself to make me worthy of their love?”. I am not going to lie to you today and say that I have healed completely from the hurt of them leaving, and that I am speaking to you as someone who has all the knowledge of how to put yourself back together after something like this, far from it. In the next paragraph or two I simply desire to give you the ammo God has and is blessing me with to fight those thoughts and fix my eyes on Him amidst the pain.

One of these blessings is the Psalms. If you haven’t taken the time to dig in and truly mediate on the Psalms, ones like Psalm 37, 46, or 139, I encourage you, go crack open your Bible. The first thing we need when we start to fall into introspection and despair, is the comfort of God’s promises and the reminder that He loves us. If you’re like me who grew up in church, it is very easy to forget just how deep God’s love is for His children because we hear it all the time from our pastor and that majestic truth becomes commonplace. Something that stopped me in my tracks in the middle of this battle was a statement from my pastor in one of his sermons. He said, “much of our falling into sadness or distrust of God’s plan can be traced back to a forgetfulness of the reality of the Gospel.” I want you to stop and think, really think, about what exactly the Gospel means for you. It is a demonstration from God in heaven that He loved YOU enough to send His own Son to die for your sins. Forget making yourself worthy of love, we all know it’s impossible. But the beauty of the Gospel is simply that, that despite our unworthiness, God still loved us. If you really let that sink into your heart, you will be amazed at the peace that floods your life.

How does this story end? Well, if you want a script for how the rest of your life is going to play out scene by scene, that I cannot give you or to myself as much as sometimes I wish I could. But this I can give you, and this is what helps keep me “unrealistically optimistic”, as I have been called at times. As my pastor said recently, “we have to fight what we see with our eyes with what we know in our hearts to be true from Scripture”. It is impossible to not see the promises of God regarding His people if you open your Bible. And, if you are a genuine, Bible-believing Christian, these promises belong to you. Promises like Romans 8:28, “God works all things together for good to those who love God”. Or Jeremiah 29, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future.” Psalm 38:39-40 says, “But the salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; He is their strength in the time of trouble. And the Lord shall help them and deliver them; He shall deliver them from the wicked and save them, because they trust in Him.” I cannot tell you the when, where, or the how your story will be good, but I want you to know this, God has promised that it WILL be good and that is what we must rest on. Sometimes our prayer to God is simply this, “Uphold me according to Your word, that I may live; And do not let me be ashamed of my hope.” (Psa. 119:116). Amen.