the beauty of hope

so I get the cool chance to read Jim's script every Friday when I prepare the powerpoint for him and I just finished reading His message for this week. The title is "holding on to hope," hope is definitely one of my favorite words. it is a word that hasn't lost its power to me. Sometimes I'm frustrated because words like love, hate, and faith are overused and they become watered down and thrown into meaningless conversation. But somehow "hope" hasn't lost its edge.

Anyways, the last couple of week's messages for CT have been hard for me to prepare and deliver because I haven't felt like I could find the message within the text for our crew there. I felt that I was just teaching it because I needed to to keep us synced up on the Journey to the Cross. Not that there weren't many great truths within the passages but my heart wasn't driven to shout the message out. I was delivering messages not proclaiming God's Word from my heart.

But, this week I'm amped up. The passage is all about rejoicing in the great hope we encounter in our relationship with God. Hope has given me new hope and I can't wait to see what unfolds as I finish preparation tomorrow. I feel like our community at CT will really be able to relate to Romans 5:1-11 so I'm really looking forward to engaging with everyone this Sunday night! You can definitely be praying that God guides my time tonight and tomorrow because I'm very excited right now. Oh yeah, back to Jim's message, it definitely left tears in my eyes and I kept muttering "wow". God's gonna do something at Heritage this weekend. (again)