<\/a>Pastor Daniel Wiese<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Life feels like that sometimes. We feel we are at the mercy of the tide, the waves and the forceful winds of life coming against us. We feel we are fighting circumstances we can’t control, and we are just trying to get a foothold somewhere, somehow. We become physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. It feels like the churning and darkness will never end. Many times our world feels like a very dark spiritual place where God is so distant.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Then, I thought of the different perspectives about those waves. From the bluff and from my daughter’s home seeing the boat struggling through the waves; from seeing up close the power of those waves on the shore, I thought of what God said of himself to Isaiah. Isaiah 55:8-9 of the Old Testament says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
What that said to me was that fighting the waves of our circumstances that is all around us, feels overwhelming. But the overall picture of what is going on in our lives isn’t the hopeless and despair we are feeling, but a tapestry of love and grace, of maturing and growing that God is creating in our lives, that even includes him working within the circumstances we face from day to day. Were we to see our life from the bluff, we would see a whole different picture. From outside my struggles, I see the rest of life and I see the lives of others and I see that my world is not confined to the struggle of the moment, but is made up of many moments both very hard and amazingly wonderful.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
My week in Homer was a welcome respite to a very busy summer. It was good to get a fresh perspective on things, on life, on God, yes and on all the stuff that is rolling around in the wild surf of my life. It is a great opportunity to get perspective. It restores hope. It reminds us of God’s sovereignty and grace. And reminds us how much he really does love us.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The Apostle Paul was talking about perspective as he reflected on the hope we have through the resurrection of Christ and what that means to believers and followers of Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, he writes, “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
To get the eternal perspective on our life we keep our eyes on Jesus. He will see us through this life and the circumstances we encounter. Jesus is the “Author and the Perfecter of our Faith.” And he will never leave us nor forsake us. That is his promise to us!<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
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\u2022 Daniel Wiese is the pastor of the Church of the Nazarene. \u201cLiving Growing\u201d is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders.<\/b><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
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The wild surf of life. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":54580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-54579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54579"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=54579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}