There is hope that comes from our struggles. It’s just hard to see it sometimes… Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. ( 2 Corinthians 1:9) I think when I experience my lowest of lows, it’s at moments in my life when I feel like I’m so high and invincible. Then I come crashing to the ground at 100 miles per hour. The sad part is that the crash doesn’t kill me. It just makes me wish I were dead. It’s in that feeling of wishing to be dead that we realize that we felt invincible for the wrong reasons. We should feel invincible because God raises us from the dead, but instead, what usually happens is that we feel invincible because nothing has attacked us and we were left untethered to anything that would ground us. Think about when you struggle. I know some of us reading this don’t understand struggle because we’ve never struggled. I know others of you have struggled so much that in reading this you get pissed off that I only compared the struggle to crashing from the sky at only 100 mph. Regardless, just think about your struggle or when you do struggle, what the purpose of that struggle is. I’m sure that from that struggle, or when things don’t go the way you want because you really don’t have control despite your best efforts to maintain that control, there is a purpose and lesson that can be learned from it all. For Paul when he literally received death sentences and hung on to dear life by the plank of a ship, he consistently and constantly came to the same conclusion: his life was not his to live, but God’s instrument to use the way He wishes. The Apostle says, “that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God…” Our struggles stem from being used by God to change a world that doesn’t want to change and we’re at the forefront of it because we are God’s tool for that change. At the same time, we struggle internally because we’re tools being implemented by God and it bothers us that things are going against us. At the same time, that is the hope we find our strength in when we struggle. God is everything we need to be relying on because we will undoubtedly struggle in doing what God created us to do. We can struggle on and have no hope from it, or we can rely on the fact that you were born to do this in the name of God. Are you feeling hopeful in your struggle?