Hope Floats Again

Welcome! It has been on my heart for a long while now to create a venue to encourage others in the knowledge of the goodness and kindness of our God. Well, here we go.

I’m assuming you may want to know a little about me and my reasons for thinking I know anything about God’s goodness.
I am silver-haired. My best friend, Julie, corrects me when I say, “gray”. I am a widow and I have two children, Stefanie, and David. David is married to Kim and they have given me the best gifts ever, my three ½ grandchildren. JD, Ben, Reagan Grace, and “Baby Becoming”, Hannah Joy, who will be arriving in August. Oh, and of course, my granddog, Baron, a huge Doberman who is sure he is a lap dog.

My daughter Stefanie lives with me in our home in Georgia, which if you’ve never tried it is the best place to live! The best part of OUR household are our 5 poodles. Yep. 5. Actually, most days we have six. My daughter keeps “Dreamer Belle”, another poodle five days a week, or more if we can get her.
We have Grace, Mercy, Joy, Gabriel Joshua and Zoe Faith, the full range of sizes and ages from 16 to 1. Cute, cute, cute!

What I really want to talk about today is HOPE. I was reminded the other day of a time in childhood when my brother would take me to the lake to fish. He got a bamboo pole for me and taught me how to put the bait on the hook and cast it.
The thing that fascinated me most about the pole was the red and white bobber attached to the hook. It would just float along on the water, bobbing with the waves and just looking like the happiest little thing in the world. I knew that the whole point of casting that bobber in the water was to catch a fish but with my gentle nature, (I don’t even kill flies) that was the last thing I wanted to do. I knew I had to keep my eye on that bobber at all times because when it went under, I had caught myself a fish and he was going to run with my bobber if I didn’t land him. Everyone would get so excited when that bobber went under the water. Except me.

Today, that bobber is the perfect representation of my hope. It floats merrily along until something comes up from under the water and pulls it down. In fishing that’s a good thing, but if that bobber represents your life and something is continually pulling you under so that you can no longer keep your head above water, then let me offer you this piece of advice. Hope floats. It really is resilient if it’s anchored in the goodness of God. If you remove what has pulled it down, it will float again. Jesus is called “the Living Hope”. If you have asked him to come into your heart, then somewhere inside you, hope is alive and wants to come to the top again. In Romans 15:13, the apostle Paul says:

“May the God of hope so fill you with all joy and peace in believing-through the experience of your faith-that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound and be overflowing (bubbling over) with hope.”

So maybe today would be a good time to ask yourself, “What is giving me that sinking feeling?” It usually has something to do with forgetting the truth about Your heavenly Father. Hope comes from knowing that God is good all the time and that He has good, hopeful plans for your life.

It does not matter how far down your bobber is in the water, Jesus can cause you to hope again. This last year for me has been a difficult time when all my hopes and dreams seemed submerged. But guess what! Hope floats again! God is SO faithful! Imagine that. He is who He says He is, He will do what He says He will do.
Would this be a good time to begin to pull in what has pulled your hope under the water and set it free to “bob’ again? May the God of HOPE fill you with all joy and peace, in believing that by the power of His Holy Spirit you may abound and be overflowing with Hope.

His Hope, His power, His Holy Spirit. His Hope bubbling to the top. Yeah God!