We cannot control our circumstances, but we can control our character.

We forget that God's primary goal ia not changing our situations or relationships so that we can be happy, but changing us through our situations and relationships so that we will be holy.

What will you reach for to give you hope, courage, and a reason to continue?

Yes, your life is messy and hard, but that's not a failure of the plan; it is the plan. It's God working to complete what he's begun in you.

God decided to leave you in this fallen world to live, love, and work, because he intended to use the difficulties you face to do something in you that couldn't be done any other way.

Remember, waiting isn't just about what you are hoping for at the end of the wait, but also about what you will become as you wait.

Psalm 27 tells that even in the middle of difficulties that we do not understand nor seem able to escape, we have reason to take heart and have hope.

you never just suffer the thing that you're suffering, but you always also suffer the way that you're suffering that thing.

The Psalms welcome us to a faith where God's agenda is more important than ours and where we are asked to live out our faith in the context of a disastrously broken world. But this is also precisely where we experience the highest personal joys, as we put our hope in the covenant love of the Lord and make the pursuit of his glory the goal of our lives.

When you are suffering, you have to force yourself to pay attention to your private conversation, that is, the words you say to yourself that no one else hears.

Look at your trials and see grace. Behind those difficulties is an ever-present Redeemer who is completing his work.

God's grace often does its best and brightest work when things are the darkest and most difficult.