Meeting Him In The Hard Times

Kristen is letting me blog again. So here it goes...

There is a temptation sometimes to want to share only the happy and uplifting times on a blog. None of us want to be perceived as week, or as struggling, or incapable of always holding it all together in a way that looks great.  I apologize, because this post won't exactly fit that mold. Lately we have just felt, for different reasons, a good bit of sadness, and fear for the future, and insecurity, and personal failure. We have had loss in our family, and have seen people that we love hurting.

Psalm 121 encourages us to lift up our eyes to the hills and to see where our help comes from. We have mountains surrounding us here in the valley that we currently live in. I took a picture yesterday, and this is what it looked like:

The mountains were all but covered up with thick darkness. And that's how we've felt. And when we've focused so far down in our sadness and in our struggle, and we can't see a way out in the moment, we often don't want to, or feel like we can't see God in that struggle. I was thinking about that yesterday after I took this picture, and it reminded me of a mountain that Moses climbed once. 

In Exodus 19 Mount  Sinai is described as being covered with 'thunder and lightning and a thick cloud on the mountain...wrapped in smoke and trembling greatly'.  But that's exactly where Moses met God, and where God even showed himself to Moses after placing him in the cleft of the rock. Moses was there in the thick darkness with God for 80 days when it was all said and done. 

It gives me hope to know that it's often in times (sometimes long times) of thick darkness that God is powerfully at work. In other times in our lives, it's been the thick cloud of darkness that has caused us to see our need of him. We've been able to see who we really are, and in time, he's shown us more of himself. God has promised us that the darkness doesn't last forever. His mercies are new every morning. 

The cloud doesn't appear to have completely passed, but we are hanging on to the promises of God and the beacon of his goodness to us brightly shining in the brilliant display of his love for us in Jesus. Praise God that there is great hope to be found in the darkness. 

Some pictures from this morning: