Through my Eyes

Throughout the last months, I have realised that when I look at poverty and incompressible suffering and heartbreak, I find it easy to slip into a way of thinking that blames God. I find myself choosing to ignore the evidence of God’s goodness and faithful and instead I allow my heart to be filled with a feeling of hopelessness that if don’t to God and surrender, threatens to consume me. Yet as I read this book, I was reminder of the reality that despite the pain, I have seen God’s redemptive hand at work in the lives of the most vulnerable and my own. I was reminded that hope is “our great expectancy that we will know Him in all our circumstances, even the seemingly hopeless ones.” Having hope doesn’t make sense to the outside world. It logical doesn’t make sense to have hope in God when there are child dying and being physically abused. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve found that it can be emotionally and spiritually tiring to have hope and faith in situations that I migh...

Over Christmas, I was given the book ‘Daring to Hope’ by Katie-Davis (author of Kisses from Katie) which I finished reading at the beginning of March. Katie was a young girl when she first moved to Uganda, subsequently starting her own ministry and adopting 13 Ugandan girls. In her first book, she talks about the journey that brought her to live in Uganda whereas throughout the second book, she invites the reader to go on a journey with her as she discovers what it means to have hope in our Father in impossible and heart-breaking situations. Throughout the book, I felt God speaking to me and challenging the way that I think about Him and who He is. As a Christian, I think that it can at times be easier to sympathize and have empathy rather than to have compassion which translates to mean ‘to suffer with’. As I read this book and looked at the examples that she used in the Bible, I began to ask myself if I truly knew what it means to suffer with the most vulnerable and I...