His Hands at Work

 "But we sorrow not as those who have no hope."

What a reflection of God's loving hand in our lives! He gives to each of His children the empowering gift of sorrow for it is through the pathway of sorrow that He teaches us the surety of our sure hope. It is through our sorrows that He fortifies our lives with a deep, unshakable, confidence in our hope. And hope, Paul tells us, makes us not ashamed but instead, the Spirit uses our confidence in His promised eternal hope do effuse our hearts with His love--to spread it abroad into every fiber of our being. And what can contain the infinite love of God from flowing through us into a world of sorrow? A world with a sorrow that has no hope. A sorrow that should break our hearts for them.

Do you see His hand moving? He takes our hand and leads us down the path of sorrow. Then, He uses that sorrow to instill within us the depth of our surety in the promised hope--the depth He knows we will need for where He leads us next. Then, He takes the love He has poured into every inch of our heart and enables us to pour it out on others desperately in need of comfort, a sure hope, an inescapable Love. It is impossible to love others as God loves without embracing the sorrow He brings into our lives.

And those empty places in our lives because of the ones we have temporarily lost will one day be filled again with their presences. But it will be an eternal filling, a filling that will be eternal, immune to all sorrows and impossible to ever be lost.

Embrace the sorrow. Stand unwavering on the promised Rock of our sure hope. Let the Spirit make you living proof that the hope is real and that the God who gives you the hope desires to love all those He brings into your life who are in need of such a hope and such an inescapable love.

We sorrow not as those who have no hope but as those called to walk the path of sorrows with the Man of Sorrows and bring a lost world to know His love, and then by the Spirit's wooing, to embrace Him as their loving companion on the journey of sorrow, sacrificial love, and unending joy.