Take Heart...

Sometimes life wells up all around you and it just gets overwhelming...or at very least I get overwhelmed. The world is a beautiful place, but ugly things live right alongside beauty. 

Babies are buried every day, suicides must be cleaned up, mothers cry, starvation is a horrible reality, cancer is not just a nightmare, tornadoes decimate entire cities, and walls of water wipe out entire coastlines. 

And people you love make choices that will hurt them and other. People run far from the very One who would save them...and my heart aches. 

I was driving in the car this morning and I struggled to believe the words floating from the speakers into the air around me "You do all things well". Sometimes life is enough to make me doubt the things I know deep in my bones to be true...

A prayer escapes my lips, a prayer born of desperation and longing. A brutally honest prayer that admits right now; I doubt in this moment. I doubt that my prayers goes anywhere above the sheet of metal that sits above my head, I wonder if my whispered words make a difference at all.

I grip to God with hands that are full of questions and doubt.

Oh God, I believe but help my unbelief.

The words of John 16 drift down around me. "In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."

And I remembered. I remembered that my God loves and is working on redeeming all of this broken mess. There is no pain, sorrow, sin, or life that is beyond His love and care.

I don't know how this story that is being written right now will play out exactly--but I know the end of this worlds story.

And He the maker of all things good--He wins.

I don't even know exactly why I am typing these words right now...

I don't know what you are going through, I don't know your story-but I do know the One who is writing it. He loves working beauty from broken things. He loves redeeming the ugliness. He brings life from ashes. And yes, the world is overwhelming but I know that He has overcome this broken world and is at work setting everything right.

Even when I can't understand and can't possibly see how this is going to work; I do know He is working all things together for my good and His glory.. And right now in this moment that is enough for me.