Relying on God

Beauty begins where self-reliance ends. You don’t realize that God is all you need until God is all you have. You will have hard times in this life, as I am sure you have figured out by now. But we don’t have to go through hard times alone. It’s those difficult times in our lives, where nothing is going right, we feel alone and like no one understands what we are going through; it is those times that we have come to our wits end where we realize that God is all we need. Sometimes it takes those difficult times to make us realize that God was always there and that He is the only one who can help or satisfy us.

We are all broken. I know that you have a hidden hurt, because all of us do. Beauty begins when we bring that brokenness to God. You may currently be in a time of mourning even now or maybe you experienced grief many years ago because of a lost marriage or a lost friend, parent, or child, or even a lost dream and you think all that’s left is ashes. But the truth is that God wants to put a crown of beauty in that place, and it’s really a miracle, a mystery, that can only be explained in and through Christ. There’s no other explanation. He exchanges our brokenness for beauty.

God doesn’t think less of us because we have broken hearts. He doesn’t think less of us because we’re weak. It’s in our weaknesses that He is strong. It’s in those very places when we’re broken and hurting that God’s strength shines through. Instead of asking “Why me?” “Why did that bad thing happen?” It should be, “Why did I get any of that goodness?” The good times with a lost loved one, or the relationships that came out of the hardship. Any goodness in our life comes from God. He is a good, good father and He is the reason we are able to look ahead to the next day with hope. He’s the one that makes us beautiful, and if we intentionally focus on the gift instead of the loss it will allow us to see His beauty in so many places that we would have missed.

Think about it: How will you focus on God’s gifts today?

Verses for further reflection: 2 Corinthians 4:7 2 Corinthians 1:9 Isaiah 61:3 2 Corinthians 12:9