No more excuses

We are told to hold on to hope. Mostly because hope opens doors and teaches you first hand that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. What light? Everything in this world is not catch and release. No; far from it. Things don't just happen. There is always a cause for something; an underlying explanation that may, at first glance, be invisible to us. We never weigh the information upon impact. We react. When the news of someone's passing reaches your ears, you react with emotion first, or you chalk it to a higher power or something before you think about it in detail. Pain blocks out reasoning. I recall when my father passed. I fell through the cracks of nothingness. Honestly, it felt surreal up until the funeral. That was when it finally hit the walls of my mind. I did not know what hope was or where to find it. None of us did. It was a terrible experience and in one way or the other, we were all broken in many places. Pain reminds us that we are humans and we are capable of emotion. Loss reminds us that this world is truly not our home and we don't necessarily keep what we get. Time does not start when the sun rises, even sunrise is 8 minutes late. Time starts at midnight; and often sunrise feels like forever away until it is not. Pain may push us towards anger and make us bitter, so bitter that if we could we'd explode into bits and pieces. But does pain not serve a purpose just as joy, faith, peace,kindness and all the other good things you could think of?

Sometimes doing the right things does not mean that the right things will happen. It is part of growing up. How else will you learn that good things do not always happen to people who do right. The purpose of prayer is not to have our needs met. So when you belittle your prayer and God's love to the answers you receive, then you are just being mean and ungrateful. Look at the Christians who have died fighting to bring you the gospel, ones who happened to be in the wrong bus at the wrong time, and all the others who died from inexplicable circumstances. Take a minute here and reflect. Can you tell me that God loves you more than He loves them? Can you say that God loves them any less than He loved Jesus? And Jesus was crucified to show you how much God loves you. That should be where you draw your faith. That is what your hope should be built on.

I want to leave you with this:
No matter what you are going through or have gone through that makes you want just explode before God. I want you to remember that If God is who He says He is, then you do not need to be making excuses to cover up for Him. He can do that himself. You should understand that you are because He is.