Hope rising

I poured out my complaint on David: I told him Judy had prayed earnestly and sought counsel before marrying, and four years later her marriage is full of strife and disappointment.

David listened a while and responded that when there is strife in a marriage, someone still needs to die to something. He said that not knowing the situation intimately, he couldn't speak to it better, but that one thing we can be sure of is that God intends marriage to be a blessing. In particular, the man is to be a sanctifying influence in his wife's life.

My friend went on in this vein for a while, and then I said to him: "It is very interesting to me to see how you did not respond to my query. Your faith is not threatened at all, is it?"

"Why should it be?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "because the way it may look to some folks is that Judy asked for bread and God gave her a stone."

David replied, "You need to see that when these hard things happen in a relationship, God's purpose is to bring to the surface the things He wants to work on in us. He is more interested in our faith than in anything else we could ask Him for. He will use adversity to show us the areas where we need to trust Him, then we can say, 'That's it,' and we can bring it before Him in prayer. It's important that we don't buy into Satan's lies, but always think about what God is seeking to accomplish.

"And Andrée, unless we keep in mind that there is a spiritual battle going on around us, and that Ephesians speaks truth when it says that our warfare is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers and spiritual forces and dark rulers of the air, then we will not have the right perspective on anything."

There are two ways to leave any phone conversation-with hope, or without hope. I didn't realize that in the past, when hope was just a word for me, the unsung sister of the trio of 1 Corinthian 13:13. It took a special friend for me to know what real hope even felt like.