Tag Archives: hard times

September 27, 2017 · 5:03 AM

Creating A King


When I was a kid, there was a Richard Pryor movie called “Brewster’s Millions”. The plot of the movie was that Pryor’s character Brewster was down on his luck when he found out his great uncle died and left him 300 million dollars. The catch was that he had to spend $30 million in 30 days and have no assets to show for it or he got nothing. His uncle was testing him to make him to make sure he didn’t waste the full $300 million when he inherited it. 

When Joseph was a young man, he had a dream that his brothers would bow down to him. They hated him when he told them the dream. He then had another dream showing not only his brothers bowing to him, but also his father and mother. His brothers were so angry they wanted to kill him. Instead, they threw him into a pit, sold him as a slave, he was then falsely accused of raping his master’s wife, and he was thrown in prison. It was nearly 14 years between his dream and the time he left prison to become second in command of Egypt.

When David was a teenager, he was anointed as the next king of Israel. It was then that he faced Goliath, was banished by Saul, hid in the desert, lived on the run, forced out of the nation, and fought many battles. It was nearly 15 years between the time that he was anointed king and actually became king. He was tested, just like Joseph, so that God could convert him from a shepherd into a king. This pattern is found all throughout the Bible, and I believe God still does it today.

Psalm 105:19 says, “Until the time came to fulfill his dreams, the Lord tested Joseph’s character” (NLT). When God puts a dream in our hearts, we undergo testing. The greater the dream, the greater the test. God uses those tests to prove our character to make sure we don’t waste the dream. He knows we aren’t ready to handle the fulfillment, so He tests us to help us become the person who will steward the dream well. If God has given you a dream, be prepared to be tested and to wait for the fulfillment of it. There is a king (or queen) inside of you waiting to come out, but it will take some perseverance to make that happen. 

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September 26, 2017 · 5:44 AM

The Anchor That Endures


Did you know that the United States doesn’t have a federal law that requires boats to have an anchor? I know that’s a random question to start your day with, but go with me on this for a minute. I’ve been on a boat many times to fish. We used the anchor to hold us in position over the fishing hole, but anchors are mainly needed if your motor dies or if you run out of gas. When that happens, your boat is simply adrift at the whim of the water without an anchor. That’s not a good situation to be in. 

Like boats, many people don’t have an anchor – something that can steady them. When bad times come or when they burn out, they have nothing to hold onto. Their life goes out of control and they begin drifting away. That’s a helpless feeling, but it’s something that all of us face at one point. It’s why we need an anchor in our lives. We need a truth that we can hold onto snd believe in when don’t have the strength to move forward. 

As Christians, we have an anchor. In Hebrews 6:19, it says, “We have this hope as an anchor for our lives, safe and secure” (HCSB). The whole world around us can be crumbling, but our anchor holds us in place. We don’t have to be at the mercy of our circumstances. We don’t have to succumb to the pressures around us. We don’t have to worry when we can’t see the future. Our hope in Jesus is secure and provides us with stability in unstable times.

Jeremiah 29:11 says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you’ — this is the Lord’s declaration — ‘plans for your welfare, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’” God gives hope because He knows it is essential to life. He has a plan for you, and He often uses hard times to mold us, shape us, and to correct our course. When we are in those times, we can hold on to the hope that He gives and it will not fail us because it is an anchor that endures. 

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September 25, 2017 · 5:31 AM

Focus On The Good


It was 14 years ago today that I hit rock bottom in life. I had endured five months of everything going wrong in my life, and on September 25th, I lost my job to top it off. Every time I thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. It was almost a daily occurrence. I laid down on the floor of my living room and told God, “If one more thing happens, I give up. I refuse to go down any further.” I went to my calendar and wrote, “The Bottom,” on today’s date. I vowed to climb out if that hole until I saw daylight again.

I didn’t know it would take about a decade before I got out of the hole that those five months created. I suffered some set backs through those years, but I never went further down than I had been that night. I was on the edge of ending my life because I couldn’t take the failure and the pain anymore. I was embarrassed of where my life was, and I knew I was going to have to make some changes to how I was living if I was going to get out of the hole. For starters, I was going to give control of the rebuild to God.

Clearly my way didn’t work. My life had been life a block tower that a kid built. It got to a point that it could no longer sustain itself, and it all came crashing down. I knew if I gave God control it would be built the right way and would be more stable. Fourteen years later, I can tell you that was the best decision I made. God has been good to me and has restored the years that were stolen. He has taken me farther than I dreamed I could go, and has given me more joy than I could have imagined. 

Today, instead of focusing on the bottom, I like to focus on the good things He’s done for me. It’s no longer about where I was. It’s not about where I’m going, and it’s all because of who God is. Psalm 103:3 says, “Let all that I am praise the Lord; may I never forget the good things he does for me” (NLT). We need to all make the decision to quit reflecting on past failures and pains, and instead focus on the good things God does for us. I can tell you it made a difference in my life, and I’m sure it will make a difference in yours. 

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September 20, 2017 · 5:33 AM

Hope Returns


There have been a few times in my life when I’ve been desperate for hope. When I was in my early twenties, my mom was in ICU at the M.D. Anderson cancer center. I remember living in that holding room for families. Each family in there lived day to day desperate for good news. Some families got it, but most of us didn’t. We were tired, exhausted, mentally drained, and were looking for a ray of hope that might mean our loved one would walk out of there. 

Another time was after my first wife left me. My business was failing and the world all around me seemed to be crashing in. When I thought I had hit rock bottom, the bottom would fall out. When I thought I had good news, it turned out to be wrong. I just wanted something to hold onto in order to keep from from falling deeper in that hole, but everything I grabbed seemed to slip between my fingers.

To be without hope is a dangerous place, yet so many of us live there. Our lives seem to have no future, and we just want something we can believe in to brighten up the darkness a little. The writer of Lamentations was there too. He was in a desperate place having lost everything. As he recounted his trouble in chapter three, he then wrote in 3:22-23, “Yet hope returns when I remember this one thing: The Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue” (GNT). His hope returned when he took his eyes off his situation and focused on God.

I love what he goes on to write in verses 25-26. He says, “The Lord is good to everyone who trusts in him, So it is best for us to wait in patience—to wait for him to save us—.” God sees us in our hopeless darkness. Looking back, He used those times to shape me and polish me. Trusting God when you can’t see a future is hard, but be patient. The Lord is good and is working things out for your good. Hope will return because God has not forgotten you.

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September 14, 2017 · 5:20 AM

God Is With You

Throwback Thursday is a new feature I’m using to help build some margin into my schedule to pursue other writing ventures. Each Thursday I’ll be bringing you a previously written devotional that still speaks encouragement to us from God’s Word.


I love reading Luke 2 throughout the year. I don’t believe the story of Jesus’ birth is just for December. Honestly, what we are celebrating at Christmas, should be celebrated all through the year. The fact that God wrapped Himself in flesh and lived among us is something to celebrate every day, especially when we’re facing mountains in our lives. The prophet Isaiah said the Messiah would be called Emmanuel which is God with us.

I’ve always loved the meaning of that name. God is with us. It’s present tense. It’s not He was with us or He will be with us. He is with us! In difficult times in our lives, we feel alone. We feel the world is against us. Our friends are scarce. Our troubles are compounded. Our stress is through the roof. Our bills are too many and too high. We feel abandoned and afraid. How we feel and what circumstances look like don’t change the fact that God is with us. They don’t push Him away when they’ve pushed everyone else away.

When we’re surrounded by the storm, the waves keep crashing into us and we feel like we’re sinking, He is with us. He isn’t panicking like we are. He knows that things are under control even when they appear not to be. The disciples found themselves in this same situation. They were on a boat in the middle of a fierce storm and they were taking on water. They were terrified until they remembered Emmanuel. “God is with us.” They found Jesus, woke Him up and then He calmed the storm.

Maybe that’s you today. You find yourself in the middle of a storm. Your mind is occupied by all the “what if’s”. You feel as though your life is sinking. Nothing is going as planned. If that’s the case, remember there is no storm He can’t calm. There is nothing that life can throw at you that He can’t turn into good for you. Even if you can’t see it, have faith. It’s especially important in those times that you remember Emmanuel. God is with YOU. And if God is with you, He is for you. When He is for you, who can be against you? 

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September 11, 2017 · 5:39 AM

Don’t Give Up


Right next door to one of the flooded houses I was helping to gut was a house that hadn’t been touched. Every house on the street had big piles of debris and trash out front except that one. I asked the owner of the house where I was helping about it. She said, “He came home after the water receded, took one look at it, locked the door, got an apartment, and walked away.” With every wheelbarrow of trash I dumped, I would look at that house and get upset. How could they walk away? 

I get that there’s a lot of work to be done, but come on. I couldn’t understand them walking away. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that so many of us do the same thing in our lives. We look at the mess and think, “This is too difficult to fix. It’s easier to just walk away and give up.” Life does get complicated, and often the messes we find ourselves in are complex without an easy solution. I’ve learned though, that messes are incubators for miracles. 

In the book of Jeremiah, he had been put in prison for speaking the truth. The Babylonians had seized Jerusalem, and they were threatening to burn the city down and take them away captive. God spoke to Jeremiah and told him that a relative was going to come to the prison to sell him a piece of family property, and he was to buy it. Why? Because God was saying that things would one day return to normal and the mess would be resolved. So he prayed in Jeremiah 32:17, “O Sovereign Lord! You made the heavens and earth by your strong hand and powerful arm. Nothing is too hard for you!” (NLT)

I can let you know that whatever you’re facing today is not too hard for God. While there doesn’t seem to be an end to your mess or a way out of it, God is working things out. Things will one day get back to normal. It won’t happen overnight, and things might get harder still, but what you’re facing isn’t too hard for Him. I’ve lived through messes where I thought there was only one way out, but God found another way. He will do the same for you if you don’t give up and walk away. 

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September 4, 2017 · 5:17 AM

God’s Faithfulness 


What would happen if you held a pen out in front of you and let go? If you did it a hundred times? A million times? You’d get the same result. The pen would drop to the ground. No matter how many times you let go, that pen will fall to the ground. Why? Because the Law of Gravity is at work. No matter what you do or what else happens, each time you let go of that pen, it’s going to fall because of the Law of Gravity. It works 100% of the time no matter what.

The same is true when it comes to the faithfulness of God. You can trust it 100% of the time. No matter how many times you rely on God, He will be faithful. Why? Because it’s part of who He is. As much as the Law of Gravity is a part of our world, faithfulness is a part of who God is. It’s something you can rely on over and over again no matter what happens in your life. Your circumstances don’t change the faithfulness of God. The sooner we understand that, the greater the relationship we can have with Him.

Over and over again, we look at things that happen to us and we blame God. We think He must not care or that He’s mad at us. Ever since the Garden of Eden, the Law of Sin has been at work on our world. It is what causes death, decay, destruction, and the things that affect us negatively. It is the ongoing consequence of sin entering the world. It has nothing to do with God’s faithfulness and everything to do with our unfaithfulness. God is the one who comes to bring us life, and has redeemed us.

One of the greatest lies of the enemy is that the bad things in the world are a result of God not being faithful to us. Paul understood this and wrote, “But the Lord is faithful,” (NLT) in 2 Thessalonians 3:3 to remind us. He knew we would need to be reminded over and over again that God is faithful no matter what happens. He is the one who works in all circumstances for your good. It’s time we quit blaming Him for the bad things that happen to us, and start learning to trust His faithfulness to work them out for our benefit. 

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August 28, 2017 · 5:39 AM

Guided By Peace


Many times in life we are faced with decisions where there seems to be no right answer. It’s tough to know what to do in those times. As I write this, many people in my neighborhood are trying to decide should they evacuate because of the flooding from Hurricane Harvey or if they should stay home and hope for the best. It’s tough to know what to do. Both are potentially dangerous answers. Both could be right answers, and both could be wrong depending on the timing.

When people reach out to me asking for prayer as they make any big decision in life, I typically pray one thing for sure. I pray that God would give them peace when they think about the answer He wants them to choose, and I pray that they would have inner turmoil as they think about the wrong choices. It’s a simple prayer, but to me, it’s the easiest way to know what God wants me to do in any given situation. 

I get that prayer from Colossians 3:15. It says, “The peace that Christ gives is to guide you in the decisions you make” (GNT). There is a peace that passes understanding when it comes to deciding what to do in life. There are times when what looks like the right decision on paper doesn’t give you peace. That’s God telling you that although everything looks right to you, in His will, it’s not the right decision. 

Whatever decisions you are trying to make today, whether they are life changing or not, stop and pray that prayer. Ask God to give you peace or turmoil. If you can’t find peace, then you may not have the right answer in your multiple choice of answers. In those times, I ask God to reveal what He wants me to do if it’s beyond what I’m thinking about. Big or small, I want the decisions in my life to keep me in God’s will. I want to be where He wants me, when He wants me there. To do that, I let His peace be my guide. 

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August 25, 2017 · 5:32 AM

Finding Inner Peace


Have you ever noticed that there are some people who are never happy, no matter what? For whatever reason, something inside of them is keeping them from finding peace and happiness. To me, that’s gotta be a rough way to live. While I was on a mission trip, I saw a kid with a stick and a make shift wheel made out of trash. He was pushing that stick everywhere while he was running. He was grinning ear to ear having a good time. I thought, “I want to be like him. Happy and content with whatever I have, wherever I am.”

I think finding contentment is a big key to life. Whatever situation you’re in, whatever cards you’ve been dealt in life, find your way to contentment. If you’re not happy now, you’re not going to be happy when you’re out of it. They say money can’t buy happiness (contentment) because your inner peace is not dependent on outer things. Through Christ, accept where you are and what you’re going through right now, look for the lesson to learn, and find contentment (inner peace). That’s the secret to a happy life. 

Here are some verses in the Bible on being content. 

1. I know what it is to be in need and what it is to have more than enough. I have learned this secret, so that anywhere, at any time, I am content, whether I am full or hungry, whether I have too much or too little. I have the strength to face all conditions by the power that Christ gives me.
Philippians 4:12-13 GNT

2. Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Hebrews 13:5 ESV

3. You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
Matthew 5:5 MSG

4. Yet true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth.
1 Timothy 6:6 NLT

5. I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
2 Corinthians 12:10 GNT

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August 24, 2017 · 5:00 AM

When It Rains

Throwback Thursday is a new feature I’m using to help build some margin into my schedule to pursue other writing ventures. Each Thursday I’ll be bringing you a previously written devotional that still speaks encouragement to us from God’s Word.


A friend of mine, Jonas Woods, recently put out an independent CD called “Tales of the Bittersweet”. It chronicles his faith and struggles over the past couple of years as his wife battled cancer. As I’ve listened to it a couple of times now, I find there’s a lot of honesty in the lyrics he’s written. It’s very relatable to anyone who’s walking through difficult times. In the song “Walking The Line,” it starts off, “I’m trying to connect, trying to make sense of all this mess, trying to get back to a sense of harmony.” It’s normal for each of us to try to make sense of a mess when we are in it. I think it gives us hope if we feel we know the purpose, but rarely do we find out the purpose while we are in a struggle. 

God’s design for our lives is that we walk by faith. If we knew the purpose behind the struggle, we wouldn’t be walking by faith. God expects us to trust Him in the mess and to rely on Him for our strength and hope. However trusting in His plan when we can’t see the outcome is so hard. It’s very much like the way Jonas’ song “When It Rains” puts it, “When you’re running a million miles straight into nothingness, and you only find out the truth when you arrive.” The journey seems long and pointless. It’s hard to keep running when you won’t find the answers until later. It’s hard to keep your head up when it’s raining and few seem to care. 

The chorus of that song is how we should respond. It says, “If you lead me I will follow, you’ve been faithful and true, through all my fear and sorrow, I’ll fight through all the pain, to figure out the reasons that it rains.” God has been faithful throughout each of our lives. When you stop and reflect on the goodness of God, you will see how far He has brought you. You will see that He has never left you in a mess. He has been your sustainer, your provider, your healer, and your guide. It’s not in Him to abandon you in a struggle. It’s not in Him to allow rain in your life without purpose. 

He has given you the tools you need to survive any rain that comes into your life. He has given you the ability to trust Him. When you get more than you can handle (and that happens), it’s your opportunity to rely on His strength. If He only allowed things to come into your life that you could handle, you would never have an opportunity to trust Him. If you had the strength to face each struggle, you would never know what it’s like to fully trust His strength. God allows each of us to experience more than we can handle, and He closes doors without opening windows so that we can grow our faith and trust in Him.

We have to learn to trust in the sufficiency of His grace. The only way we learn that is when we come to the end of our rope and let go. When we give up trying to face struggles and situations in our own strength, we learn how strong He truly is. When we quit relying on our abilities to guide us through problems, we learn what walking by faith is. When you look into the future and can’t see the end to your struggle, learn to look at it from His perspective. There is a purpose to what you’re going through, but it may take years to get the perspective to see it. In the mean time, trust His strength in your weakness when it rains. 

To hear Jonas’ song “When it Rains”, click here. 

You can also check out more of his music here. 

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