“How do you get up day after day to face a world of brokenness and hurt and failure? You murmur the question and you hope that no one hears you: Is God really good, does He really see me…?”

Katie Davis Majors asks hard questions in her book, Daring to Hope. It’s not a new title, but it’s one of my favourites, and I want to share a few thoughts from it with you today.

I think we all could tell stories about ways life didn’t go how we wanted it to, how we begged God to do things our way, not His. Can we watch life crumble and still believe?

Honesty can be so healing. Katie writes of a time when life went sideways for her, when the happy ending she wanted is not what she was given. She says, “Everywhere I looked, suffering abounded. This realization left me with two explanations: either God is not actually who He says He is, or He is and I needed to relearn how to know Him even in hardship.”

Katie takes her readers on a journey as she does just that. She relearns how to know God, even in hardship.

• She testifies each day about who she knows God to be, even in the midst of disappointment.
• She sees how the glimpse we get of God’s face during times of pain is up close and intimate. It changes us.
• She embraces God’s presence with her in the story, in spite of the not-happy ending.

It can be hard to acknowledge pain and disillusionment in our lives, to read about it in someone else’s life, but I love Katie’s book. I love how I hear echoes, in her words, of my own questions and fears and hopes. I love that, in spite of the struggle, her spirit stays healthy.

• She knows God does not abandon us.
• She knows we are called to surrender control.
• She knows that He will heal our wounds, if not in this life, then in the next one.

Love can be messy.

Pain can be a gateway to deeper intimacy.

Our God is good. He isn’t done with us. He holds us through it all. He pulls us close. He never turns away.