What’s been on your heart or mind to pursue? What are you really passionate about? Where do you want to make a difference? When an opportunity presents itself do you stop yourself from pondering all of the possibilities? Do you immediately convince yourself that you’re “stuck” wherever it is you are right now?  

What if you and I agreed to stop stopping ourselves? To quit giving up before we even begin? I’m certainly not suggesting that we should be reckless in our decision-making, but what if we nudged each other to get a little more comfortable being uncomfortable? What if we didn’t have to have every detail worked out before choosing to learn or discover more? What if we were ok with having more questions than answers? What if we let go of our excuses and encouraged each other to go after that goal or dream by simply beginning to take a few small steps.Decision-making often takes time. And we kinda like things to happen right now, don’t we? But what if we allowed it to be a process?What if we supported each other in praying about it and gave ourselves space not just to think about what could go wrong, but also to consider everything that could go right?

When you and I are stressed and anxious it’s a good indication that we’re focusing only on what we can see. We’re zeroing in on the problem, the pain, the challenge, or the illness, which are all temporary.

So where do we go for hope?

It comes from you and I realizing that there’s more to life than what we see. Simply put, this life is not all there is. What we see is temporary and what we don’t see is eternal. We can live above the pain we experience in this life when we know and believe that will live forever with God in a place without any pain or suffering.  
It’s so easy to lose heart, isn’t it? Life is hard and there’s things we face that tempt us to want to throw in the towel and give up. But our eternal reward is going to be far greater than anything we could ever imagine. It’s going to outweigh the pain we’re encountering in the here and now. In our weakness, we experience God’s strength. It’s a moment by moment process.  
We can’t allow our challenges and fears to shrink our faith. Check out these reminders I read this morning in the “Life Application Study Bible” about the benefits we can uncover in the problems we encounter.
(1) Problems remind us of Christ’s suffering for us; 
(2) they keep us from pride; 

(3) they cause us to look beyond this brief life; 

(4) they give us opportunities to prove our faith to others; and

(5) they give God the opportunity to demonstrate his power. 

When we choose to see our troubles as opportunities, we are allowing God to do His work in us. He changes our hearts and we become more like Him, which is something we’re not capable of doing on our own.