Hope is soul food. We can live without it for a few days or maybe a few weeks, but living without it for very long causes us to be careless about life, experience depression, feel overwhelmed by shame, and isolate ourselves in the very moments we need connection in healthy relationships.
Faithful love meets our God-given need for trust and offers us hope. Faithful love reminds us we are not alone, especially when we're experiencing struggle. Living with hope, we experience emotional elasticity. We bounce back from hard times and recognize that struggle is a normal part of life on this planet.
When we learn to count on the faithful love of God and others, we heal and mature. We don't get stuck in negative emotions. We remember, "There is great hope!"
In this episode, Doug and I (Janet) talk about trading our moral compass for a truth compass, and we offer these takeaways:
1. God knew the knowledge of good and evil would be a slippery slope that led to confusion, self-righteousness, pride, and prioritizing behavior and performance above intimacy in relationships. He never wanted that for us. Living with a truth compass, instead of a moral compass, keeps me intimate with God.
2. There is never a time when God does not love me as much as He is going to love me.
3. There's a difference between knowing and experiencing and it's important. It's the difference between knowing your Heavenly Father loves you and experiencing His embrace when you're at the place you need Him most. The more we experience love in our human relationships, the more fluent we can become in experiencing God's love, too.
We talk about a FREE RESOURCE available on my website and recommend these books:
THE CURE by John Lynch, Bruce McNichol, and Bill Thrall
EDUCATION BY DESIGN, NOT DEFAULT by Janet Newberry
