Hope Where All Seems Hopeless

I glanced around at my surroundings, unsure of where my fourteen-hour journey had taken me. I had prayed for this trip for months. I felt certain the Lord had called me to this ministry. But as I stood and took in everything around me, I suddenly felt unsure, weak, and incapable of doing all that I had been called to do.

I was in the Appalachian region of the southern United States; an area of the country where poverty reigns. It was a third world area, in a first world country. I didn’t realize that poverty existed to that extent in the United States of America. I was terrified at the thought of spending the next three months in an area that seemed so hopeless. Why had I been sent here? This area was in need of way more than I could offer. Where do I begin?

I repressed my nervous insecurities and got straight to work. I drove around to different communities scoping out basic home repair projects. As I pulled into the first community, nothing inside me was prepared for what I saw; a house in desperate need. It seemed impossible to me that people actually lived in this dwelling. The roof was falling apart, with holes scattered across the old, worn shingles. Shattered, dirty glass lay glistening on the ground where the majority of the windows had been busted out. One whole section of wall was missing, allowing me to see straight into the bedroom of the man and woman who called this place their home. The couple came out to meet my teammate and I and welcomed us into their home. I shook hands with the woman, probably around my mother’s age, as I noticed how worn and tired her face appeared. The four of us slid into their home by a piece of chain link fence used as a wall to keep critters out. I wanted to hear their story. How had they gotten to this point? Was it by choice? Did they even know any different? I tried to push back the jumbled thoughts in my head to make conversation with my new neighbors. But what was there to say to them? I had never felt so many worlds apart from anyone in my life. Every word and thought seemed so vain and meaningless as I stood on their dirt floor, with a leaky pipe over my head.

My teammate carried the conversation as we all discussed ways to help their living situation. “Lower a pipe there, replace windows here, and strengthen the weak floor up there.” Before I knew it, I found myself sliding out past that same chain link fence back into their front yard. The emotion I had been suppressing sense I had arrived, boiled inside me. How does an area like this exist? Will everyone continue to forget these people? Where is God in all this? How has He allowed this to happen? These people need the deep love of Christ.  Am I even capable of showing such love?

I looked at the beautiful mountains on each side of me that blanket these people in security as I began to call out to God. “Father, I need strength to love these people like you do. I need my heart to be softened to your will. Provide these people with hope! I need to know you have not forgotten these people like everyone else has!” As soon as the words left my lips, God gently placed a verse on my heart “The rich and poor have this in common: the LORD is Maker of them all” (Proverbs 22:2 NIV). I was reminded that God did care for them more than I ever could. It was in that instant, that I no longer felt worlds away from these people, but rather viewed them as dear friends and family. We were united under a banner of hope provided by Jesus’ death and resurrection. I had never been so thankful to Jesus Christ for overcoming the world.

The rest of the Summer I witnessed God do amazing things in the lives of these people that I grew to love, cherish, and admire. Through Christ, my new friends and I were able to walk hand in hand in a perfect brightness of hope along an illuminated path, instead of stumbling aimlessly in the darkness where poverty had previously reigned. At the end of my time in Appalachia, I looked around at the place that I lovingly began to call home and was so thankful that each face I saw was the image bearer of a divine God. A God who DOES care, a God who IS hope, and a God who is NEVER finished working in the lives of his people.

Grace in the Raw and Real...

I’ve wrestled with writing this blog for the past 24 hours. Not because of the topic itself, which happens to be my favorite thing to write/speak on. But rather the extent that such a topic can undoubtedly unnerve people in light of recent events. Grace.

I read a quote recently that said something along the lines of, “God can not bless a believer beyond their current disobedience.” Unfortunately, the logic behind such a statement is believable to many outside, and inside the Christian circle. Thankfully, that is not the type of God, or the type of grace that I have experienced in my own life.

Grace from God is too big, too wild, too unimaginable, and too free to be restrained by disobedience! I can think of many times in my life (more than I would like to admit) that God took my disobedience and out-graced it beyond all imagination. His grace didn’t end where my disobedience began. When we start putting limits on God’s grace, it posits a God who is powerless to save sinners like me.

God’s grace is for the woman who sells her body for her nights drug money, and for the man who relentlessly takes advantage of her and pays her. His grace is for the girl who sat by me in college who is trashing her life with nights of cheap vodka and its false pretense of freedom. God’s grace is for women desperately in love with other women, and men in love with other men, and for those who throw hate in their faces. His grace is for the men and women who destroy the sanctity of marriage with infidelity, and for the men and women who are tightly held by the clutches of pornography. Gods grace is for abusive fathers and the grief stricken mothers addicted to painkillers. Gods grace is for messed up people who kill innocent children.

Grace, as I have come to know it, is for those of you who have caught a glimpse of yourself in that paragraph, and for those of you whom have no grace to extend to one or more of those people. His grace is for those of you who feel angry with me for writing such a blog, and those of you who find freedom in such a blog. God is NOT, and WILL NOT be limited by human failure, disobedience, and shame.

Grace as I have come to know it, can turn disobedient sin, into life.

Ephesians 2:4-9 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.