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Jesus is Enough

The past couple of years haven’t been easy for most of us. We experienced a lot of unexpected changes, unknowns, and difficult times. But through it all, I have learned that Jesus is enough . His Word is enough. As the world seemingly falls apart around us, we can cling to Jesus, who remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. He never changes. His promises to us are true. He is faithful. He is good. He is trustworthy. If Jesus is all we have, we have more than we deserve and everything we could ever need. He is the giver of life and peace, and because of Him, we have hope. Jesus is enough. I find that I can easily get distracted by the troubles around me and take my eyes off of Jesus. This only results in fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness. But when I turn my focus back to Jesus, I am able to live confidently and in peace because I know He is faithful. Jesus is enough. As we approach the time of year where many celebrate the miraculous birth of our Saviour, I can’t help but be in a...
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Letting People In

If you’d told me five or even two years ago that I would start writing blog posts, I would’ve laughed at the idea.  You see, I’m someone who’s very reserved when it comes to communicating thoughts and feelings, even to people I trust. I’ve struggled with this for years. Sure it’s good to have a reasonable amount of reserve, but my tendency is to push everyone away and bottle everything up inside. The closer I grow to God, though, the more I realise how unhealthy that is.  In the Bible, it says to “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2 ) I can’t bear my burdens alone. God knows that, and He’s shown me how true it is. He’s shown me that I need Him above all, but also that I need to be willing to open up.  If we’re called to carry each other’s burdens, how can my fellow Christians help me carry mine when they don’t know about the burdens in the first place? How can my friends pray for me if I can’t admit I need it? So when I started th...
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Trusting God With Our Broken Pieces

It can be so, so tough to remain trusting and hopeful for something when it continues to leave you disappointed, and you watch as hope slips through your fingers. When I’m really suffering, physically from my chronic pain or emotionally from the weight of it, or from dealing with some of the memories of traumatic medical procedures I’ve had done, it can be so impossible to keep my chin up and to keep hoping for healing, for relief. Everything feels empty, even God’s promises at times. Those days are much harder to keep hoping that God’ll show up for me, that He’ll bring my body relief from my pain, fevers, weakness. That my life would finally hit play and move forward after it being on pause for years. Hospital visits would finally come to an end, and so would all the lab work and invasive, painful tests I’ve had done over the years. For things to be okay again. Not having that normalcy I used to have can be brutally hard some days. Questions of why? are more real now than ever before...
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Spending Time With God

Have you ever wondered why we spend time reading our Bibles or praying or evangelizing or any other “spiritual things” that we as believers do? Why do we follow God? To be completely honest, I’ve been asking these kinds of questions a lot lately. I was talking with a close friend recently and something they said made my mind spin. They said, “Think about how much time you spend with God. Now think about how much time God spends thinking about you.” In my life right now, there’s a big difference if you’re going to subtract those two times from each other. When my friend said that, I was brought back to my question of *why* we spend time with God. If God spends every minute of every day thinking about each person on the planet, why do so many of us (me included) spend so little time with Him? He’s the one that made the universe and chose us as His children to love us, and all we give Him is a few minutes of our day? What kind of child is that? Even more than that, though, what kind of fr...
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The Purpose of Pain

My pain always has a purpose.  That’s something I’ve had to remind myself a lot of over the past few years. Because when life is hard and circumstances aren’t ideal and trials are ongoing—it’s so easy to lose perspective. To look at the hard things I’m going through and wonder how God could ever bring any good out of them. To question God’s sovereignty and His love for me.  How can a good God allow pain?  How can a good God allow suffering? I was reminded of the life of Jesus and how Jesus went through unimaginably hard things towards the end of his life—betrayal, pain, abandonment, and ultimately, death on the cross. And sometimes I forget that Jesus already knew what was ahead of Him—all the hard things He would go through and the pain He would experience being nailed to a cross.  He knew—and in spite of what was ahead of Him, Jesus still chose to trust God. To say “thy will” instead of “my will.”  Can you imagine saying that? Even if I knew the outcome of my ...
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The Blessing of Waiting

Are you in a season of waiting on the Lord’s timing or direction for something in your life? Maybe in a relationship, ministry or job opportunity, or your future in general? This is the season that God has had me in for the last many months, and it has been hard! I am, by nature, a planner. I love having a goal, something I can be working for or towards--so having no clear direction for my future has been difficult. Waiting truly is hard! In fact, a season of waiting can be one of the hardest things in our walk with Christ.   It is easy to become discouraged, and the enemy tries to make us feel like it is a wasted time. But it is not! In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is an opportunity to put your faith into practice in anticipation of God's future plans for your life. Waiting seasons aren’t dry and purposeless; they are beautiful and important. Did you know that in Scripture, when it says to “wait on the Lord,” the word “wait” in Hebrew actually means to take time to linger in...
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God's Presence in Our Pain

This morning I was reading Genesis about Hagar. God intervened in her life when she’d given up all hope…and when things seemed impossible, that’s where God worked a miracle and made a way for her and her son.  I read a quote by someone recently who was talking about Hagar’s story, and it was so good: “We may not know God’s plan for our pain until heaven, but we can be assured, as Hagar was: He sees us and loves us.” I thought about my sister, Grace, who has gone through unimaginably hard health trials, when I read that. There are so many times throughout these past two and a half years where my heart just breaks when I think about all my sister has and is going through, and I think, “God, what are you doing? How is this good?” I don’t know—and I may not know until I can ask God one day in eternity. But. Just because God may not give me the answers I want now doesn’t mean it’s not okay to wrestle with them.  Because when we wrestle with the toughest questions life can throw at ...
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