by Naomi Moon

True Hope

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“Ah, Lord God! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you.”
Jeremiah 32:17 English Standard Version

 

“Surely he has borne our griefs

    and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

    smitten by God, and afflicted.

 But he was pierced for our transgressions;

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

    and with his wounds we are healed.”
Isaiah 53:4-5 ESV

Bless my husband for shoveling our sidewalks when we got hip deep snow during Holy Week in North Dakota. There are many things that are difficult in this life, like shoveling wet, heavy snow. But there are even more difficult hardships we endure daily. Maybe you feel the weight of a strained relationship, or the weight of an aging body, or the weight of a home burned from a wildfire.

God, our Heavenly Father, created all things, including the snow. Nothing is too hard for him. We endure hardships daily that feel too difficult for us to bear. In fact, we know we cannot bear them on our own. As we see in the text from Isaiah, Christ bears our griefs and sorrows with us. He knows the hardships we bear and died on a cross so that we might be free of them. We might, through His sacrifice, live eternally in the glory and power of his creative and loving arms. The hardships of relationships, of pain, of creation, will be no more when we are reunited with him in his return. This is the assurance we have that one day, everything will be okay.

Copyright Family of Christ Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado