Faith means you take God at his word, you never let yourself think that you're smarter than him, and you live inside his boundaries.

As much as we try to make sense of our lives, there are things that we simply aren't able to understand.

Peace and hope are never to be found in your efforts to figure out the future. God's secret will is called his secret will precisely because it is secret! No, real hope is found in living inside the implications of what it means that God holds your future in his wise, powerful, and gracious hands.

There is so much that we are incapable of understanding. So rest is found in trusting the Father.

Your story is a biography of wisdom and grace written by another.

even though there is very little that we know for sure about our lives and we experience constant surprises along the way, we need not give way to panic. Yes, our lives are out of our control, but that doesn't mean they are out of control. No, our lives are under the careful administration of the One who had the wisdom and power to be the great Author of it all.

Prayer is surrender to the reality that there is wisdom greater than ours. Prayer confronts us with the fact that we are not as smart as we tend to think we are. It reminds us that there is so much we don't know or understand. It tells us that life is not found in our limited understanding, but in surrendering our lives to the care of the One whose understanding spans from before origin to beyond destiny and includes everything in between.

Awelessness that leads me to question God's power and character will cause me to take my life into my own hands, and because I have taken my life into my own hands, I will rebel against what God calls me to

There will be moments when you simply don't understand what is going on.

When we say that God designed human beings to be interpreters, we are getting to the heart of why human beings do what they do. Our thinking conditions our emotions, our sense of identity, our view of others, our agenda for the solution of our problems, and our willingness to receive counsel from others. That is why we need a framework for generating valid interpretations that help us respond to life appropriately. Only the words of the Creator can give us that framework.

We can experience peace in the face of the unknown. We can feel an inner well-being while living in the middle of mystery. Why? Because our peace of heart does not rest on how much we know, how much we have figured out, or how accurately we have been able to predict the future. No, our rest is in the person who holds our individual futures in his wise and gracious hands. We have peace because we know that he will complete the good things that he in grace has initiated in our lives.

When my hope is in my ability to rule the day, my spouse becomes a constant threat rather than an intimate companion.