We had the pleasure of meeting three new gals tonight, in addition to one who came back who we were so glad to see again!
Tonight was a bit of a hodge podge of topics. Lots of word pictures, which work well for me...but if they don't for someone else, well, tonight may have been a little hard to follow!
First I read the ladies a blog post that you can read here. It's talking about things that act as bungee cords, snapping us backwards as we try to move forward, and how to cut the cord. Not that what is behind you is bad or must be forgotten, and not that what is ahead is excellent or what you want, but that in order for us to continue walking we have to be free of things that snap us back.
I shared about one of the things on my 1000 gifts list - being thankful for weeding the sandpit after it rained. Weeding sets off my allergies, I'd rather there not be weeds in the first place, weeding is still work, even after rain. However, after the rain they come up easier and I get more of the roots, which means a smaller chance that the exact weed will grow back. Seeing weeding as a chance to be thankful rather than a chance to gripe. And drawing a parallel to life - people often connect rain with trials and difficulty. Yet it is often after a storm that we see most clearly and can uproot what had been holding us back. Things we may have not realized if the storm had never come.
Sometimes it's when we're telling God exactly how we feel and how wrong this seems and how we don't understand that we hear ourselves saying a deep-rooted lie we didn't even realize we believed. Now is the perfect time to uproot that lie.
Amy brought up what she'd been learning in Bible study about the word "hope," and how Biblically it doesn't mean what we think it means. We use the word to mean something we'd like to have happen but aren't sure will happen. But the Bible uses hope to mean something we are assured will happen. We are assured of God's promises, so we can hope in them.
The idea of hope is key to how life with God is radically different than life without God. With God we can have times of despair, anger, frustration, deep disappointment, and grief, while always knowing that there will be a way out at some point in time. Without God, there is just despair, anger, frustration, deep disappointment, and grief - never ending, no reprieve imaginable. I am so thankful to be on the side of hope. To have hope at my side. To have hope in my heart.
