Desperate Hope Quotes

“In the middle of what our brains see as chaos, God directs an imperial symphony that sings of His greatness. Nothing is beyond His control. Nothing happens without His knowledge, much less without His working it for good, and nothing is left to chance.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“Our lives are far more important than they may seem. Our legacies have the capacity to be treasures to cherish or trash to bury. We can affect the course of someone else’s life by our actions, by our words, by our efforts. Jesus in us can make the glorious impact a treasure. Left to our own devices, we contribute little more than good intentions.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“We who believe may dwell in a sinful world, fallen and certainly not in its grandest form, but the perfect God we serve occasionally bends to kiss us with moments of absolute perfection, breaks of clarity in our muddied and fractional eyesight.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“The great mystery of fellowship is the give-and-take that occurs, usually without feeling a tug at all. Once you experience true fellowship, it doesn’t seem a burden to invest in someone else’s life. Instead, you tap into deep waters that are running inside of you, spilling out for giving life to others.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“Time is precious. We may treat it like the candy in Granny’s dish, spending it without thought, or we may think of it as a priceless artifact, relishing every second that passes. Either way, it ends. Either way, time will cease. Our plans are no match for time. They can and will be left in the dust once we finish expending breath.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“we often forget to look for beauty when beauty seems to be in short supply. We become accustomed to seeing with eyes infected by a world that has lost hope. Yes, the world is imperfect … But God is not. We have hope when hope seems just a nice idea from ages past. The perfection of our God floods us with hope from heaven and glimpses of the perfection for which we were meant.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“Come face-to-face with pain—enduring, unrelenting pain—and you’ll know what it means to see time stand still. When pain comes, life stalls completely. Pain has the unique ability of trumping everything else on the schedule.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“there is no going back when purpose is branded on the inside.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“It is never fun to feel the reins being pulled from our hands, sometimes snatched from them. But sometimes it is necessary, and the stark contrast between what we dream and what God dreams becomes vividly clear: We are a poor substitute for God. We are not in control. (Does this thought absolutely scare anyone else?) And in the midst of our subconscious quest for control, the broken justice system of our minds sometimes manifests itself in the form of ultimatums. It’s almost foolish to think, but we place faith ultimatums on God quite often as a way of exerting our skewed justice and false control, all the while maintaining the mirage of omniscience.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“we have the tendency to justify our selfishness by camouflaging it with our concern for God’s glory. Making much of God is always appropriate, and when we throw this into our rationalizations, we find a way to weave our selfishness into the mix and call it God’s will.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“Satan enjoys our proclivity for control more than just about anything else in the world because it’s just so easy for him to distract us from the untainted and complete beauty of the lordship of Christ. The more we grasp for control, the less we make of His rule, and the less we make of His rule, the less we trust Him to be who He says He is—God. Satan often uses our willingness to be self-sustaining as a tool to separate us from the sustaining rule of Christ. We love our independence, and we sometimes fight tooth and nail against the very One who jump-started our breaths and gave us our legs to walk away, all because our plans seem more important than our Creator, our control certainly more enticing than our surrender.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair

“How quickly our plans can be brought to ruin, our hope shattered into fragments of disbelief and doubt. Tragedy has a way of bringing hope to the surface and causing us to look it squarely in the eyes; to find out what it—and we—are made of.”
― Candi Pearson-Shelton, Desperate Hope: When Faith in God Overcame My Despair