My Hope

Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living:

My Hope

“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” Job 42:5

The times that have most impacted my walk with the Lord are the times when my faith faltered and I felt alone.

The time my heart was broken at sixteen. The time I didn’t get into nursing school. The years we struggled with infertility. When my father was killed by lightning. The times I had no more tears. The times when everything screamed that God wasn’t there—that He didn’t hear my prayers—that He didn’t care. I have lain prostrate on the floor—face down—tears streaming—begging for answers, and the only answer was silence.

Job, was in that place. With his possessions gone, his children dead, his wife urging him to curse God and die. And he rebuked her. He questioned God. He begged to die. But he didn’t.

He was godly man, yet when Satan asked to test him, God allowed it, and “the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning.” Why?

God says, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” And when Job’s heart was ready to receive His words God answered. And after the painful testing, Job said, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.”

I have learned to listen for God’s voice in the midst of the pain. I can trust Him to be there when I can’t sense His presence. He is there when circumstances say He has turned His back.

Like Peter trying to walk on the Sea of Galilee, it is when I take my focus off of God that I begin to sink. Only then can fear of the wind and waves overtake me.

The heartbreak brought me to Jesus. A place opened up in the college of nursing the day before class began. The Lord blessed me with two wonderful children through adoption. My dad’s testimony continues, eighteen years after his death. He daily enables me, though my health problems multiply.

God is faithful. He doesn’t always take me out of the storm, but He goes through it with me.

He has stretched my faith to the limit, but He has never failed me. Those times of pain and heartbreak have brought me to greater faith and given me a solid basis for hope when it seems there is no hope.

If things look dark and hopeless today—place your hope in God.

© Copyright February 24, 2014, by Norma Gail Thurston Holtman.

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