Thankful for God's Faithfulness

Honestly, my heart is breaking right now. I don't feel like writing this blog or doing anything else for that matter. And yet... the title of my blog is "Hope in Jesus". Can I still have hope in Jesus when I am hurting and would just like to snap my fingers and be in heaven with Jesus and Ty? Even though I don't "feel" hopeful, I can choose to go back to His Word and be reminded of His faithfulness in Psalm 33:4:

"For the word of the Lord is right and true; He is faithful in all He does."

I can also choose to go back to my journals and read of His faithfulness time after time. I just want to be very transparent with you and let you see that life is hard and many, many times I have to cry out to my Heavenly Father and express my feelings of hurt, loneliness and despair and ask Him to give me hope again. Interestingly enough, that is where I was at most of this past week-end.

Last month I shared a verse the Lord gave me from I Thessalonians 5:16-18.

"Rejoice always, pray continually and give thanks in all circumstances for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."

Well...yesterday morning when I woke up I was feeling quite overwhelmed as I thought about facing another day and the upcoming winter months without Ty. I just wanted to pull the covers over my head and make life go away. I was again thankful that Ty and Yance got my dog, Shea, for me. I have to get up to take care of her and that includes taking her for a walk. That morning as we walked, I remembered the verse again and thanked God for the beautiful fall morning and for my family and many friends. I again was very honest in sharing my thoughts and feelings with Him. I asked Him to show me His glory and told Him that I could sure use a "God-wink" (special blessing from Him). Many times in the past, especially when Ty had cancer, He would send me a shooting star, but this particular morning the stars weren't very visible because of the full moon. I continued to walk and talk to Him, but I just didn't feel His closeness. Then, He directed me to look up and a star shot across the sky! It was so amazing. You need to understand that it has been a long time since He has blessed me with a God-wink in the form of a shooting star. He knows our hearts though, and knows when we desperately need a reminder that He hasn't forgotten about us. I praised Him again for His faithfulness as I headed back home and was even more amazed when I turned on the radio and heard the song, Wish You Were Here by Mark Harris. It made me cry as I could imagine Ty singing the words about holding onto Jesus until He takes me home. I thought, okay, I can do that. Life is so short, and I will soon be in heaven too. Again, the Lord knew what I needed and encouraged me with that song. I hope it will encourage you too as I have posted it at the bottom of this page.

You would think that after the blessings He gave me yesterday that I would be having a better day today. That's not how life works though. Each month that I write this blog, Satan tries to put me down and get me very discouraged. He doesn't want me to share about the hope I have in Jesus. That hope is there no matter how I feel. I am thankful for my friends and family who have walked this road with me since Ty's death in October of 2009. The prayers, cards, encouraging words and love have been a tremendous blessing. I especially enjoyed a very special time with my family last week-end (the first anniversary of Ty's going to his forever home with Jesus). We spent Saturday at the Wichita Zoo which was especially fun with my grandson, Preston. We all missed Ty but were glad we could be together and rejoice in our Lord's faithfulness to us this past year.

That faithfulness is what He reminded me of this morning as I read from the book, God As He Longs For You to See Him by Chip Ingram. As Chip says, "God wants us to pour out our hearts to Him to bring our problems, pain and failures to Him. That's what Jeremiah did and he found that no matter how dark or bad his circumstances, they did not match God's faithfulness."

Jeremiah wrote in Lamentations 3:21-24 "Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself,
The Lord is my portion; therefore, I will wait for Him."

Chip says: "We taste God's faithfulness when we begin to trust Him with our tomorrows and then watch to see what He does. Jeremiah learned to greet each day with an assurance that the Lord was his "portion"-- that God is the one solid, unmovable, reliable part of any day. No one delivers like He does. We must learn to place our hope in Christ--not in stuff, not in good health, not in the future, not in the stock market, not in the ups and downs of dating life or marriage. Every other basis for hope will let us down. Only in Christ do we find the secret to a life of unending joy and peace, because He is the only one who will come through for us 100 percent of the time in any and every situation forever."

A. W. Tozer writes: "Upon God's faithfulness rests our whole hope of future blessedness...only as we have complete assurance that He is faithful may we live in peace and look forward with assurance to the life to come."

I am thankful for God's faithfulness. I chose to share my heart with you here not because I felt like it at all but because I knew God wanted me to. He gave me the words and the songs to share. I hope that you are encouraged and you too will run to Him even when you don't feel like it because He is faithful and will never leave you or forsake you. I'll leave you with the song, My Redeemer is Faithful and True by Steven Curtis Chapman as well as the Mark Harris song I mentioned above.