Do you ever struggle to believe that God is really making all things beautiful? I think we all do sometimes. Today, I want to offer you some encouragement to keep believing and trusting him.
As we prepared to go to Kenya last September, one thought played like repeat on the radio station of my mind:
“He makes all things beautiful in his time.”
Some friends and I were going to pour God’s word and his love into the lives of teen mothers and their babies, and of all the things I could tell them, that’s the one my heart was certain they should know.
It’s redemption lived out day by day.
But how to share that hope with those who have been so hurt?
I thought of Naomi, who had left Israel full and returned empty, and remembered the day I looked straight in the mirror and said, “Don’t call me Charlie. Call me disappointed.”
Like Naomi, I knew the feeling of emptiness that left me wondering where God was and what he was doing.
Even in those moments, I saw beauty though so that’s what I told them. I shared God’s promises of hope and restoration and the fact that he fully restores.
We don’t always see it that way because the breaking down and the building up are processes that are painful and, sometimes, painfully slow.
But the process is always in place.
God has been doing the work of redemption since the very first sin. Abraham followed looking for a permanent home he never had here. John got a glorious glimpse of God’s work done, but we’ve been waiting to see it ever since.
And that takes faith.
A lot of it, actually, and that kind of faith can be hard to come by, can’t it? We get bogged down in the busyness of living and lose sight of the life to which Christ called us. We struggle to believe when things go badly. We get impatient and want to know, “Why?”
We need help to have faith, and Christine Hoover‘s new book Searching for Spring can offer it. Searching for Spring is a treasure trove of encouragement to have faith while we wait.
That’s what the book is about after all, the fact that “God may be silent, but He is never still.” He’s always working. Christine likens him to an artist, painting color across our lives and into a dark world. She explains how he’s the author, using the fact his heroes need help to bring glory to himself. He’s our bridegroom, gone to prepare a place just for us, and we wait with faith for him to return and claim his bride.
Searching for Spring explains in detail why any of that even matters and what it means for our lives each day. Christine shares the fact that God is composing a symphony all around us, his world and our hearts beating to the rhythm we must follow, and it calls to mind a verse I painted on a canvas before my first child was born:
“By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me – a prayer to the God of my life.” Psalm 42:8
God may be silent, but He is never still.Click To TweetWhen reading Searching for Spring, I could feel his love wafting my way. Christine challenges you to look around and see beauty, his beauty, all around you and to hope for how he will make even the hard things beautiful in time.
I don’t just believe that because I’ve seen it; I believe that because He said it.
He will “work all things for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
Searching for Spring will help open your eyes to some of the ways he might be doing that.
You can purchase a copy of the book here. I pray that it will encourage your heart and strengthen your faith and am so thankful for the opportunity to share it with you!
*Disclosure: I received a review copy of Searching for Spring from the publisher, but the opinions are my own. You can read my full disclosure policy here.