shining in shadows!

*Grrrr I forgot to date this Krisism before I took the picture, BUT the date is there now :) but onto the deepness!

I had a friend chat me on Facebook a few minutes ago, explaining how he is so scared to open up to people because he just feels like everyone is going to hurt him or leave him. And he has a "right" to feel that way, he experienced a lot of emotional pain growing up. And its these times where I really look up (like in the picture haha) and just think how cool God is, because just last night, God gave me the words to speak to him today.

I was at a Chrysalis gathering (a church meeting) and I was listening to this pastor speak. And he was referencing to this sermon he had preached a while back, that was talking about shadows: how in the midst the darkest moments of our lives, we don't see that bright light at the end of the tunnel, or better yet, we sense absolutely no hope.

But look at the beauty of shadows: what MAKES a shadow? It takes us to be in a certain place, where something is BLOCKING light. Even when we're standing in a shadow, light exists.

God doesn't want us to walk around paranoid that we're gonna get hurt or we're gonna be lied to or someone close to us is going to betray us. He doesn't want us to be in these dark moments, these shadows, and He especially doesn't want us to feel so overcome by these fears, to think that when we are in these dark shadow, that there is no hope.

I told my friend, "When we're in these hard times where we are so paranoid that we are gonna get hurt by others and that there's no hope that we're gonna find a friend or two who won't hurt us, that fear is false, because hope exists. God made Eve so Adam wouldn't be alone, and you can take that in a marriage-sense or a friend-sense. But God didn't make us to feel alone."

Maybe you can't relate to THIS shadow now. But I can bet that at some point in your life, you've been stuck under some shadow and you weren't able to see how it was going to get any better. But there is hope in that sad situation - so don't give up. Keep searching around in that shadow for hope, and you'll find it. With courage and strength and perserverance, hope exists. It's shining through those shadows :)