Every day in the summer I end my day by trudging a three-mile hike on a hillside called The Bluffs. I sometimes listen to podcasts and I always talk to Jesus about the details of my life – the stories filled with heartache, joy, dilemmas, and love. And somehow through the details of the beauty God has created on that hillside my story joins His story, and there are moments when I know the truest things are not the worries I have for my children, the shame I feel about my own inadequacies, or the frustrations I feel over even the daily dilemmas of what to have for dinner or what to watch on television that night. The truest thing is demonstrated in the beauty I get to walk into. The beauty on that hillside drowns me in the Gospel and fills me with hope.
“The Good News is that in Jesus there is the absence of condemnation and the presence of the future – the future where the stories we’d rather not tell are no longer. As Tolkien wrote, ‘One day all sad things will become untrue.'” (Jason Micheli)