Dear Friend,

I know what you’re going through. Not because I have been there, but because I see you going through it.

The struggle is real, as they say. The pain is real. The anger, the questioning, the loss of hope – it is all real.

But hope is real too, and it isn’t unrealistic or naive. I want to hope for both of us. I want to hold out hope that God is good, that nothing is a mistake, that His Word is true – His plans are good and not for our harm – and that He will fulfill that. In you, in me, in our families, in our world.

I want to carry it all for you: the doubt, the pain, the heartache, and the anger. I want to believe in Him enough for us all. I’m going to try.

I see and feel your pain – again, not because I have necessarily been there, but because you are walking this journey and I want to walk it with you. I choose to walk with you – no one should ever have to go it alone.

I want to hope for the end result – the hindsight-gratefulness we will possess when we see what God’s plan was all along. I want to remind you daily that we can either choose to be part of the plan and the miracle that He is doing in your circumstance, or we can choose to be angry and question Him and miss the whole miraculous thing. I mean ultimately, what choice do we have? If our circumstances are miserable, we can choose to be miserable as well. But even when our circumstances are miserable, we can choose to believe in the God who brings beauty from ashes, who tells the most beautiful stories, who lives present and strong, even in our most messy and mundane moments. We can choose to trust Him, to fall back on Him, because we don’t have any strength left in us, but He does.

He is for you, friend. He walks before and behind you, knowing your every step, present in your every day. He is a God of hope.

Before Him we didn’t have hope; we were literally hopeless. Dead in our sin, crushed by our circumstances. He is the hope of the world! Why do we forget that?

We can have hope in His plan, in His purposes; because He demonstrated how much He cares. He sacrificed so that we can have hope, and it won’t put us to shame.

He tells us this in His Word: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” Romans 5:1-5

Dear Friend, I love you so. And He loves you so much more. Let’s hold onto hope together, and carry the weight for one another when it gets hard. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

Love,
Kal