Recently I was reading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (the backstory of Middle Earth) and Andrew Robert’s The Storm of War (a history of World War II). One story is set in the beauty of an exquisite and enchanted world, with glorious beings and tales of mystery and wonder. The other story is set in the industrialized and mechanized and brutal and violent modern world. The contrast between the glory and beauty of the one world and the horrors and devastations of the other could not have been greater, especially because [...]

Hope can be difficult to hang on to sometimes. We want to believe things will get better, but disappointments continue to come. We think we are just in a hard season, but the hard season never seems to end. We know that Christians are supposed to have hope, so we beat ourselves up for feeling despair. We think that feeling hopeless must mean we are not very good Christians. But the people of God have struggled to hang onto hope throughout the ages. Such is life in a broken [...]