The earth comes alive with fresh spring colors, celebrating rebirth.

Hidden eggs and colorful candy, butter yellow chicks and soft rabbits.

Cream colored lilies adorning churches.

Daffodils and tulips sway in the breeze.

Best Sunday dresses and ties to match.

Hymns and prayers, messages of hope.

Not everyone joins in the celebration.

A young mother is facing her fourth surgery today.

A family grieves the suicide of their loved one.

A couple have separated.

All around us, people are facing something.

Through faith men have conquered kingdoms

gained what was promised

and shut the mouths of lions.

Quenched flames 

escaped the edge of the sword

and women received their dead back to life again. 

But some did not.

There is suffering in life.

Repulsive, horrific, tragic, tormenting agony.

We question why? How can a “good” God allow such pain?

He did not remove it but God literally left his holiness and stepped into a world of corruption, depravity, and wickedness, in the human form of a man, to save it.

Perhaps it is because without the human form he would have obliterated earth entirely because of his holiness.

God wanted to show his love in a way we could understand. Jesus took on all of the depravity of mankind on the cross.

3 days later he came back to life, showing us He is God.

Who else would have power over death?

This is the hope of those who are happily celebrating today.

This is the hope of those who are not.

How is it that some get answers to prayers?

How is that some do not?

It’s easy to celebrate when there was a good outcome.

It is not easy to celebrate when there wasn’t.

Let’s remember

those who were all commended for their faith

yet none of them received what had been promised

since God had planned something better

so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Hold onto that hope today.

God didn’t give to one and not to you.

God gives those who are suffering comfort and peace.

God sees.

God knows.

God is with you.

God promises that one day, he will make it right.

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not  persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.

-The Bible