Hope in the Storm

We just bought a car. It's my favorite color,green. I know that's an odd color to love, but I do. My car is a gray green, which satisfies 'green haters' because it's not an 'in your face' green. Anyway, because we just got it, it gets top priority in the garage during storms. My husband's truck is second, which leaves our suburban outside. No big deal until a storm with hail. We've sold the suburban to our son, so we really don't want it in the hail either. Consequently, my husband is planning what to do in case of the storm we're expecting. Where to put vehicles, how to get ready, etc. More planning for this storm than one I've seen in a long time. We don't always plan for storms, and when they happen we frequently don't know what to do with them. That's me. There have been a lot of times that I have been a 'glass half empty' kind of girl. Rather than being able to look for positives, solutions, or hope my natural tendency is to sit right in the middle of my despair and wail. Sometimes when even a simple step to the right or left would improve my situation, I couldn't seem to get there for 'enjoying' my experience in the mud. The reason I wanted to talk a little more about chapter 6 in "Fearless" is because I think a lot of us are like that. We get so caught up in the fear and despair of a situation that we can't figure any way out of the feelings we are having. We get bogged down, negative, depressed, and pull farther away from God. There are so many things to love about the Bible, but one of my favorite is the perfect way God designed it to speak personally to people. Even so many hundreds and thousands of years later, this book speaks to Vee Ann in her sewing room in April, 2013. Amazing. The other thing I love is that the same verses can teach so many different things and be so applicable to so many situations. Last time, we looked at Matthew 14, and the story of the disciples in the boat as Jesus walked to them on the water. In that instance, we were talking about how Jesus turns up for us in unexpected times and places. Looking at the same story again, Lucado reminds us we have another major message in this lesson: where to stare in a storm. We have all heard this lesson before, but somehow we have trouble remembering it when caught up in our own storm. Keeping our eyes on Jesus is the only way we can "walk on water". Eyes fixed to Him, Peter was cool. Walkin' like he was on the beach. Eyes taken off of Him in fear, and Peter sank like a rock. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Kind of like my wallowing mentioned above. The fear and desperation when in a life storm are overwhelming if we don't let our eyes fall on Jesus. Lucado reminds us that we can't choose whether or not storms come, but we can choose where we 'stare' during the storm. But how do we do that? How do we fix our eyes on Jesus when our eyes are darting left and right, looking in fear for the next shoe to drop? Hebrews 2:1 states: "We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. (NIV) Pay careful attention to what we have heard.....hmmmm. What does that mean? When fear gives us a complete form of amnesia, we forget what our history has been. We forget what He has done for us in the past. We forget Who He is, and what he promises. We just draw a blank. The trick to finding that peace in the storm is to REMEMBER. REMEMBER His word, REMEMBER the past with Him, REMEMBER how He has protected us, and loved us, and worked all things together for our good. C.S. Lewis, the author of "The Chronicles of Narnia' was an interesting fellow. Google him sometime. Raised in the Church of Ireland, Lewis became an atheist at age 15. His conversion to Christianty was slow and what he described as "Kicking, struggling, and resentful." Yet he went on to give us some of the best writings of Christian authors. Max Lucado quoted him when discussing the ability to "keep the faith" during crisis: "Faith.....is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change,whatever veiw your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.....that is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off' you can never be either a sound Chriustian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion." A great example of how to do this......how to take the emotions out of it and remember.......is given in the book of Lamentations by Jeremiah. Jeremiah has been called the "weeping prophet" by scholars because of all the difficulties he had in his ministry. But Lucado points out Jeremiah's writings in Lamentations chapter 3. The first 20 verses of this chapter point out the state of Jeremiah's mind. Words such as affliction, walking in darkness, the Lord's wrath, bitterness, hardship, darkness, no escape........sounds like some of my funks during a storm, how about you? But the important thing is this: verse 21 changes everything: 'Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope." (NIV) The next 44 verses are a repetition of the goodness of God, the history Jeremiah has had with Him, and the reasons we can trust God's will. Hope. Hope in the storm. I challenge you to make a list and post it. Remember a time in your life when you were in despair. Totally under. And how God brought you out of it. His plan was best, whether best now or best for eternity, and you came out on the other side in one piece. That's God. That's the power we live under as believers. And by remembering, willfully remembering, His goodness and mercy in the midst of the storm, we can have hope and a life worth living.