Hope for the Heart
The holiday season can be an interesting time of the year. For many it’s a time where your heart rejoices over getting to see family gathered together in one place eating the best of foods from your family tradition! For others it can be a time of great grieving because maybe this is the first Christmas where you won’t get to see someone you love for the first time because they passed away earlier this year. I don’t want to write as though these two realities don’t exist, my hope is that you would find God to be good in it all because He is a God that delights in loving His children and meeting them exactly where they’re at.
This post will be a bit different than most. Each section will be a prayer written out for you to read for whatever situation you find yourself in or need a reminder of. It’s often in prayers when I feel God sees me, knows me, and cares for me most and I’m praying that these prayers bring you to that same point.
GOD AS YOUR FRIEND
Within the margins of your day, life can be a lot. It may seem like nobody gets you, understands what you’re saying, or even cares about you. But I want you to remember this; God knows and loves you. He sees you when you wake, is with you during the dreary part of your day, is caring for you when you sleep, and intricately moves in your life so that you would remember that He is good in all things.
He cares for you infinitely more than anyone else has or even could. He longs for you to remember that He is Emmanuel, God with you. He isn’t with you out of mere obligation, He is with you because He loves you and even likes you too. He likes to hear what your day was like, what pressed upon your heart, how it made you feel, what it made you think, because He is a God who is tender and gentle when listening to the hearts of His children.
If you feel alone, know that God is with you. If you feel like nobody hears you, God is listening. If you feel like nobody understands you, God took on flesh so that he could understand what it’s like to be a human just like you and me. God does all of this not because he likes to just do good, but because He is good in his own character and nature. God isn’t just some person who’s set himself above the clouds to never be reached, He’s your close and intimate friend who cares for the very people He came to save.
GOD AS YOUR CREATOR
All things have an origin or a creator. All phones have an inventor, all books have an author, and so on and so forth. The origin of every single thing on earth is God. He formed the mountains, filled the seas, and made you and I all out of His divine love. Nothing in all of creation was made out of lack of care. In the beginning, after God drew His breath and spoke, it was said that, “It was good” after each day of creation.
When God made you, it was uniquely different. God picked up the dirt from the ground and began molding the first human. From the type of hair He would have, the blemishes that would arise on his complexion, the personality he would take on, his height, even the types of food he would be satisfied to eat. Yet when we think about how God made us, we don’t quite put the same recognition into the way God formed us.
He’s made you beautifully. Even though you, me, and all of humanity are born into a sinful nature, it doesn’t diminish the beauty from which God made us. Because if we’re made in the image of God, nothing can change that breathtaking reality. May your heart and mind remember that you haven’t been forgotten, God cares for you because He has made you, and that if He can care for the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, won’t He care for you too?
GOD AS YOUR HEALER
You may have a sensitive area of your heart that you leave untouched because of all the pain that’s occurred over time. Maybe you’ve been wounded and afraid of opening yourself up again in fear of being hurt. Maybe you’ve become closed off due to the fear of becoming like something you grew up promising you’d never become. Or maybe you’re just tired of the process and don’t think there’s any way to find healing from all of life’s circumstances because you’ve never seen any good come from life. Yet there’s a God who heals.
There’s a God who’s healed the wounds of a mother who longed for children for all of her days. There’s a God who’s cared for the body of a woman who wanted to simply be healed of her ailments and He provided healing for her. There’s a God who sees what you’re going through, and wants to heal you too.
No matter how small or big the situation, God cares for the hearts of all His children and eagerly invites them to His table where he feeds and nourishes their souls. God is strong enough to withhold you when you feel you have no strength left to preserve, God is good enough when all you see around you is pain and darkness surround because He is an all encompassing light of everlasting goodness, God is even kind enough to share Himself with you so that you would know someone is there that is gentle and lowly in heart; providing for you His own Spirit, His own word, so that you would come to see that He is enough. You can lay down your life, give Him your burdens, and in exchange He’ll give you His grace and His burden that is light. His burden is one of infinite grace able to withstand the strongest of storms.
Take heart and know that God is there for you. In the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, in sickness and in health. Because God will always give hope for heart exactly when you need it. Blessings.