It has to be Jesus

I am quite without answers tonight and feeling rather broken by so many things that are going on around me.

One of our babies fell off of a bed and landed in boiling water yesterday. She'll be okay, but she is burned.

I asked one of my friends the other day what the mark on her face was from. She said she scratched herself. I asked if her husband hit her and she repeated her first answer. I asked her again and she said, yes, we got in a fight and I couldn't block it.

Tonight I found out that one of our moms tried to commit suicide. Thankfully, she was unsuccessful, but doesn't solve the problem.

I know one girl who can't live with her family because there is too great a chance her step-dad would abuse her when he's drunk.

And I have so many friends and know so many people who don't have the jobs that they need to support their families.  I know far too many women who are beaten by their husbands, but just accept it as normal. There are so many families whose houses need to be fixed or who need a new house entirely. There are so many kids who are just always sick with something or struggling in school or hungry.

And I want to help them all. I love them. My mind can very quickly try figure out the practical details of how we could help in the best case and worst case scenarios for all sorts of different situations, but none of them are the best answer because there's only one thing they really need.

And so what breaks me most inside is what they don't know: the hope which meets them in their failure to commit suicide and the added weight of that to the struggles that led to it in the first place. The one who sees the marks on their bodies, but also straight into the deep places in their hearts where the scars are, the places I've only caught glimpses of before all the walls go back up. The love which can reach there and heal there and speak truth there that says it doesn't have to be this way.

And so my prayer is that they would know the heart of God for them, that they would understand his love is immeasurable and always enough for them and how very, very good he is and how very, very good his heart towards them is, that they would meet the one who saved them and lay everything down to walk into the sweet surrender of his life, that they would grow in trusting the one who made them and be secure in his love and his truth really knowing he is for them.

Because none of our programs will work on their own and we can throw them all away tomorrow if we're going to be stuck inside of them. It has to be Jesus. He's the only answer that will never fail.





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