And suddenly, something happened–all this stress began to melt away. Like ice against the sun, his presence thawed away all the feelings of hopelessness. I started singing with joy as I declared God’s praises. Instead of dread, I was filled with hope.

The hope for new beginnings in parenting mistakes lies in self-reflection. It’s taking those moments apart piece by piece, examining the portions in God’s presence. Once the pieces are all out on the table, we can learn from them.

Our God, an artist and a poet, is always making new things. What if we believed this was true about the daily work happening inside of us? What if we believed there was a canyon being formed by the river of our hearts as well? That in those small subtle moments when we believe we’ll never grow out of the fears that plague us, it is precisely then that God is faithful to come alongside and cultivate the soil of our heart, creating a place that can hold growth, that can sustain change. It is then that God watches as tiny seeds planted in the soil of our hearts begin to grow, seeds we didn’t even know were there.

Hope doesn’t look flashy or beautiful. It’s not something you can simply post about on Instagram, with a filter to make it shiny, especially when it is a hope for something that hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes hope looks like tears, praying that God will make something new. Trusting in His promises, regardless of your current circumstances.

God has promised strength and power to those who put their hope in Him. We all grow weary and stumble, but we can be renewed. We all experience times of weakness, but Jesus sympathizes with our weakness. As we choose to place our hope in God and not in ourselves, other people, or particular circumstances and outcomes, we will experience His strength.

In the same way that the Spirit filled a young girl all those thousands of years ago, in the same way that the Spirit hovered over the waters of an unformed sea, in the same way that the Spirit came into the body of a dead man and brought him to life again, so our bodies–through the tremendous mercy of God–have the same capacity to hold that Spirit. God answers the plague of lies by God’s own abundant presence pouring inside us.

We look at the hurt and pain of this world, and we hope for something different, for love to win, for people to be cared for and protected. We look at the promise of heaven and want to see it come to pass. We hope for our days, for ourselves. We hope that we will find patience towards the people around us. That we are living up to our potential. That we will be a light in the world.

But what does that actually look like? What does it mean to have hope when life doesn’t match up to what we are hoping for?

The beauty of breath prayer is not that it only make us present to ourselves, but that we are made aware of the presence of God. We are meant to be in communion with God, and prayer is the conduit to experience the fulness of his presence.

God does not ask us to be constantly busy, nor do we need to fill our days to prove our worth. In fact, He calls us to the opposite. God reaches out and reminds us our worth does not come from how full our days are, or how important we may seem. Our worth comes from the very fact that He created us.

You don’t have to wait until the stars of your life align, for your problems to vanish, or to understand the mysteries of life. You do have to keep taking your heavy burdens to the Lord. You have to be willing to let go of all you hold onto, so that He can hold it instead. Joy is available here and now and it’s birthed out of a renewed trust in God.

We cause ourselves heartache and hurt, making situations worse and bringing unnecessary pain and stress into our lives. For as much as we want power and control of our own lives, we are not equipped to be God. How can we come to trust again when we know both our proclivity to wrest control away from God and our tendency to feel like we let God down by not trusting? Friend, there is hope.

Do you want deeper, spiritual relationships? Ones that help you draw closer to God while getting closer to others? We are created for community, and when we find others who share our faith, that’s a real treasure worth exploring.

Hopelessness can be tempting. When life gets hard, I tend to measure my situation by what is missing, not by what I have.

We all have times when we are lonely, when our efforts to develop friendships falls flat. I remember a lengthy season in which I was very occupied but completely unfulfilled in friendship. I have learned to trust that God does want community for me, and that these times are temporary and can teach us some useful things about God and about ourselves.

Life can feel a lot like that path my husband and I hiked. Though beauty and blessings surround us, the challenging parts keep us from seeing and enjoying them. The busyness of life grabs our attention away from the simple moments.

As we weather all of life’s endless transitions—of shifting relationships and careers, deaths of loved ones and changes in our environment, cross-country moves and persisting through the ordinary seasons, what would it look like to trust the branch beneath our feet will hold when we land on it?

In times of transition, we struggle and second-guess our decisions for work and calling. What I (and I suspect many others) didn’t realize was that the questioning would periodically creep back into my life, even ten years after college.

Sometimes we have to wait for God. We want God to move, to act, to do. We pray about direction, about health, about emotional stability, and God is silent. There’s no answer. We have to wait, and in the waiting, we can start to feel alone, isolated, ignored.

There have been many times when I have longed for precise life directions, when I wished for explicit guidance in the face of uncertainty. While the Bible makes clear God’s moral will, it doesn’t leave us specific instructions. Instead, Jesus gives us a simple command to love God and love others, a command that can be carried out in billions of ways. Although how we live out this calling is largely up to us, we can glean some helpful principles from scripture.

When we begin to worry about what God is doing in our lives, we grow dependent upon our personality, gifts, and resources, and that's not how it's supposed to be. God's word tells us that His thoughts are so much higher than ours, so how do we attain His thoughts?