Hope Lives!

So I've long been a fan of Compassion, International. They're an organization that reaches children in poverty and helps them help themselves and their families out of it. They do it using local people who are working for the betterment of their own community with money donated by sponsors in the US and elsewhere. The child that you sponsor is not a "representative" child that fifty-thousand other people are "sponsoring." That child is unique to you and your family and for $32 a month is well-fed and schooled. They write you letters and you can write them back. You can even send them Christmas presents or other special things for their community or family.

Anyway, Compassion has recently gotten into blogging, thanks in no small part to Christian musician Shawn Groves. Currently, he and several other bloggers are in the Dominican Republic seeing the work that's being done there and opening themselves and Compassion up to the world through the various blogs. They're also sponsoring their first ever blog contest! So here's my entry describing how hope lives in my life.

Ever since I was young, my favorite Bible verse has been Psalm 30:5b "Weeping may endure for a night, but Joy comes in the morning" (that's the Leia Standard Version, btw). Whenever anything "bad" has happened in my life, that verse has been my mainstay because, not only does it give me hope for this life (i.e., as Scarlett says, "Tomorrow is another day!"), but it reminds me of the hope that I have for my eternal life after I die here on Earth.

When I was going through my various breast lumps and wondering if at 23 I had breast cancer, I knew no matter what I was going to have to deal with, that God would be there with me through it all...and even if I died of cancer, I was gonna go to heaven, so woohoo!

When I lived and worked in Baghdad, I knew that, even if I were kidnapped or worse, that God would be with me through it all, and even if I died, God would be glorified through my death (as he was through the deaths of my friends), and I was gonna go to heaven, so woohoo! While others in my company wanted to hunker down and stay in our office instead of going out and actually _helping_ people, I was ready to go out to the "dark" places because of that hope.

More recently, when Baby Jones' first sonogram showed a "soft marker" for Trisomy-18 (a genetic disorder which only very rarely allows the baby to make it to term, much less live outside the womb), the only thing that kept us sane was the knowledge that God was in control. It wouldn't make the loss of this little one hurt any less, but we could rest in the knowledge that God had a plan even for the shortest of lives, and that He would be glorified through it all. And we were happy to give Him the praise when the follow-up sonogram showed no signs of anything other than a healthy baby!

Hope lives in my life because I can look back across the years and see clearly where God has taken care of all of my needs (and those of my family) and given me so much more than I could ever ask or imagine along the way. Knowing that He's always done that in the past, I can rest assured that He will continue to do so in the future.

As Bill and Gloria Gaither said, "Because He lives I can face tomorrow. Because He lives all fear is gone. Because I know Who holds the future. My life is worth the living just because He lives."