Expressions of Hope - Blog for grieving parents by GPS Hope

November 4, 2015 by Laura Diehl 2 Comments

God Sees, He Knows, and He Understands

I had a wonderful revelation this morning….God “gets” me.

He understands why I think the way I do. He understands why I struggle with the fears and anxieties that I do. He understands why I have outbursts in my fleshly nature instead of yielding to the Spirit within me. That is pretty incredible. It makes sense to Him…even when things I do don’t make sense to myself.

Why do I say that? Because of what I read in Psalm 139. “O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thoughts afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it altogether” (verses 1-4 NKJV).

Do you see what I saw? He gets me. He understands my thoughts. He isn’t shocked by my words or actions. He knew what I was going to say before I did. He knows me inside and out.

Those of us who have children know at times why our children are behaving the way they are.

“You need a nap!”

“You had too much sugar this afternoon at that birthday party!”

“He is teething.”

“She gets really excited when her dad comes home from work.”

“I know you are cranky because you need something to eat. Sorry I couldn’t make supper earlier.”

“Stop making excuses and get to bed!”

“Put your phone down and start your homework.”

Guess what? God doesn’t understand us just some of the time; He understands us all the time. He understands you. He understands the tears. He understands the strange thoughts. He gets why you did what you did (even if it was out of your frustration and anger). He understands the busyness that keeps your mind off of something difficult. He understands and knows why you (and I) overeat.

He “gets” it. All of it. Because He created you, He lives inside of you, and He knows you better than you know yourself.

That doesn’t mean that if what we are thinking about or we doing is sinful that it’s okay, and we can just continue on.

What it does mean is that He doesn’t condemn us. (He convicts us through the Holy Spirit, which is different.) There is a reason we think, say, and act the way we do, and He sees and knows what those reasons are (even when we don’t).

I don’t know about you, but that is a huge relief to me. He sees and knows the deepest thoughts and motives of my heart, and loves me anyway. He loves me so much that He patiently and lovingly exposes those things to me so that I can be free of them.

And that’s what I want, too. I want to be free of the things that I allow to be excuses in my life; the things that are keeping me from living in the fullness of joy God says I can have on this earth. How about you?

God “gets” me, and He “gets” you! He sees, He knows, He understands, He loves, and He sets free!

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God. If you would like to receive Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

October 31, 2015 by Laura Diehl Leave a Comment

Change Can Be a Good Thing

Changes are difficult. Sometimes we resist change in our lives, like if we have to sell our house and move away from our friends and start going to a different school. But often those changes bring good things into our lives. Especially when God is behind the changes.

It is like a kernel of corn that gets turned into a corn flake. That corn has to be picked, and smashed, and baked to be put in a cereal box for our breakfast. Would you rather eat a hard piece of corn from a field without even cooking it, or would you rather eat the corn after it has gone through all the changes to become corn flakes?

Changes in our lives can be hard to go through, but it can become something very good in our lives. Maybe when someone moves, it puts them in a new church where they learn how to move in the power of the Holy Spirit, or they meet the person they will marry someday.

We know it is important to trust our parents. They protect us, and they take care of us and they bless us with things like ice cream and birthday presents. God is our Father in heaven, and He does the same thing. He protects us, takes care of us, and blesses us with good things. And sometimes there has to be difficult changes in our lives for these things good to happen.

Psalm 13:5 says, “I have trusted in Your loving-kindness. My heart will be full of joy because You will save me.” Change is hard, but when we trust in God, it can become something better than we had, and even become something great!

October 28, 2015 by Laura Diehl Leave a Comment

Are You Involved in the Boomerang Generation?

For many years while our children were growing up, my husband would say our children are going to be arrows, not boomerangs (based on Psalm 127:4). In other words, when they leave home they will be shot out with our blessing like an arrow, and will not be returning back home later like a boomerang.

Now that we have finished raising all five of our children, we discovered that wasn’t the case. We also discovered there seems to be a stigma, especially among Christian parents, that if we allow our adult children to live with us, we are enabling them. We are told they need to learn responsibility, be independent, and we need to send them out to fend for themselves.

That may be true in some cases, but not all. Yes, there are some adult children who will remain at home and live off of their parents because they are lazy, and as long as the parents will allow them to continue, they will do so.

But many of these adult children are not lazy. Some of them need to live at home to cut down the ridiculous expense of living on a college campus. It is obvious that we live in a time where it is difficult to make ends meet with only one income. Those who are not in college struggle with day-to-day living expenses: paying rent, owning a vehicle, the required insurance on the vehicle, replacing socks and worn out jeans, mandated health care costs, along with the “need” for things like a smart phone in today’s world. These are expenses that can easily go beyond an entry level job.

Yes, I know our generation did not need cell phones, and in some places there is public transportation available. But our offspring are not living in the same world we grew up in. And some of the things we, as the older generation, can view as wants, can rightfully be considered needs in today’s world of technology and communication, such as a portable computer of some kind. (I know there will be some of you who do not agree with this, and that’s okay.)

It has been a delicate balance of walking this fine line with our adult children, as I am sure it has been with many of you as well.

And it complicates things when your adult children have their own children. This is becoming a much more common issue all the time, also. When a grandchild is involved, the impact on that child’s life has to be considered as well.

Imagine my surprise, when a few years ago I learned this generation of adult children is actually called the “boomerang generation,” and are beginning to be studied and get media attention. (Too bad Dave couldn’t get credit for naming them, since I have been hearing him say this for at least 20 years.)

We can look at this situation through two different lenses. We have to deal with our adult children living at home, or we get to deal with our adult children living at home. I will admit, I have gone back and forth between these two views for several years now, as I live it out.

When Dave and I got married, I already had a daughter. We have now been married for well over 30 years, and we still have yet to have a time in our marriage where only Dave and I live in our home. I will admit, this has taken its toll on me at times, as I feel like I just want everyone out.

During one of those “seasons,” I told God I needed something to hold onto, while waiting for that time to come. He reminded me how we each have angels assigned to watch over us. That means the more people I have living in my home, the more angels I have surrounding us in the spiritual atmosphere. This was actually a pretty awesome thought, and I thanked the Lord for bringing it to my attention.

In many other cultures, families don’t move away from each other like they do in the Western and European countries. Here in America, we pride ourselves in independence, but I am not convinced that is a good thing, especially when it distorts how God set up families to function, to depend on each other. “God sets the lonely in families…” Psalm 68:6. We need each other.

God is a generational God. That fact can be found throughout scripture. He takes the relationship between the generations very seriously. He also expects there to be spiritual interaction and mentoring between the generations. Psalm 78:4,6, and 8 says, “We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done… so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children.Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.”

Do you realize that when Joshua went to take the people in to claim the land God promised them, they had to stop and circumcise all of the males? That is very shocking! It means all those years wandering in the wilderness, the parents were not making sure their children were in covenant with God. God took that very seriously. (And it was not the fault of the children; it was the parents who failed to take seriously the destiny of their children.)

If you have found yourself in the same position as me, with boomerang children in your home, I am not going to try to tell you there is a need to pray and reevaluate whether or not they really should be living in your home. I’m going to assume that is something you have already done, and the answer is yes.

What I will do, is encourage you to do the same things I did. First, see this as an opportunity to continue being an influence (as a sideline cheerleader, not trying to discipline them when that time of life has come to an end). And second, ask God to show you the benefits and the blessings of your adult children living in your home.

If we have adult children living under our roof, let’s make sure we have God’s perspective, and see them as the gift they are. We are truly blessed to be part of God’s generational blessing in our home.

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God. If you would like to receive Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

October 21, 2015 by Laura Diehl 2 Comments

Are You Waiting on a Promise From God?

When a woman is pregnant, she is given a “due date.” How often is that baby born on that exact date? When the baby doesn’t come, does she decide that means she no longer wants it? Does she give up on it ever coming? No, of course not.

And yet, that is what we do to God, when He gives us a promise. It puts us in a place of expecting, but for some reason we think that promise should be delivered in our timing instead of His.

And we are so good at getting upset with Him for taking too long, to the point of either giving up on it, or trying to make it happen our way.

There are all kinds of examples of people in the Bible who were given promises by God, and it took a lot longer for those promises to take effect than what the person thought it would. Some people waited patiently, and some people tried to do things their own way, making a mess of things.

The Israelites, who were led out of Egypt by Moses, ended up wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. They themselves did not go in and receive the promise of a new land. It was their children who went in to inherit God’s promise and become the nation of Israel.
The example that seems to be the most common is Abraham and Sarah. In waiting for God to give them the promise of an heir, Abraham had sexual relations with Sarah’s maid. She conceived, had Ishmael, who was not the heir of God’s promise to Abraham, and we are still dealing with the consequences today.
What about Noah? He was building an ark at a time where water had never fallen out of the sky. It took 100 years for him to build that ark, and to have the promised rain to fall and flood the earth.
Even though David was anointed as King of Israel, for many years he was running for his life from Saul, before he actually sat on the throne as the king, fulfilling God’s promise to him.

Have you ever noticed when it is God’s time to make good on His promises, He often moves in “suddenlies”? Well, it is sudden to us. He has been busy behind the scenes the whole time, doing whatever needs to be done to keep His promises on track to give to us.

Remember the disciples in the upper room? They were told to wait until the promise came to them (Acts 1:4). And when it came, it was definitely a “suddenly.”

There are people all around you who have experienced God’s “suddenly”; people who have faced a disease or infirmity such as back pain for 5, 10, or 20 years who suddenly get healed. Couples who have been infertile for many years suddenly find themselves expecting a child. People who have needed a job or been in financial hardships suddenly get the job they need.

What about those who don’t get healed, or don’t get pregnant, or don’t get that dream job? I have been hit smack in the face with that question several times.

One time was when our 3 year old daughter had bone cancer, going through nine months of chemo and had her leg amputated. The most recent was when that same daughter died, due to heart damage caused by those chemo drugs that saved her life 26 years earlier.

Believe me, I know the line, “She is healed. She received the ultimate healing and is in heaven now.” Let me just say, that is not usually a comfort to most people who are in the freshest part of deep grief, especially a parent who has so wrongly buried their child (regardless of the age of the child).

When I found myself in that horrible place, I had to ask God once again about this issue of faith and expectation. My daughter had lived through multiple life threatening health issues in the last year and a half of her life that should have killed her. It was only by God’s miraculous hand she survived several of the things she did. The goal of her medical team was to get her healthy enough to be able to receive a heart transplant, should a heart become available for her. I believed with every fiber of my being that God was going to either miraculously heal her heart, or she would get that transplant. I had seen miracle after miracle of things she lived through that should have already killed her multiple times.

As sick as she was, I felt very blindsided the night my daughter’s heart just gave out and she left this earth and transferred to her eternal home.

One day in my deep sorrow and anguish, I asked God about this. He reminded me of Hebrews chapter eleven verse six, that “without faith it is impossible to please Him.” In other words, faith brings Him pleasure. He let me know that my faith had brought Him a great amount of pleasure. I realized at that point, that faith is more than just saying what you want and getting it because of making a demand on God and His power. Faith is based on my relationship with God.

Up until that point, I had always seen faith as something I had to somehow reach out and get a hold of. I had to grow that and get more faith by reading my Bible enough, hearing enough messages, finding ways to be around God’s Word to make my faith grow. And it felt like I could just never have as much of it as I needed. And yet at the same time, I knew how much faith I had in God to heal my daughter.

God began to change my perspective on faith. In the Complete Jewish Bible version, you will never see the word faith. It is always translated as “trust”. So Hebrews 11: 6 reads, “And without trusting, it is impossible to be well pleasing to God, because whoever approaches him must trust that he does exist and that he becomes a Rewarder to those who seek him out.”

For me personally, I find it much easier to trust, then to have faith, if that makes sense. I’ve always felt like faith is something I have to conjure up. But trust is something I can just surrender to, and release myself into it. And that is where the relationship comes in. My faith in God is based on my trust in God’s Word, His faithfulness and His goodness. That means, even though my faith did not receive what I was believing for, my trust in God was rooted in my relationship with Him, so my faith was not shaken.

I am in good company. Hebrews chapter eleven is pretty much a list of many people who did not see their faith in the promises of God manifested on this side of eternity.

I have continued to expect God to keep His promises to me. And God has continued to remind me of His goodness, His faithfulness, and how much I can trust Him, with things like the birth of my next granddaughter almost one year exactly after losing my daughter from this earth. He used my sons, who would do things like surprise me with flowers, or send me incredibly encouraging text messages. Since that time, God has also birthed a ministry in me, flowing through me in such a way that I wrote my first book, followed by three more books in the same year!

God truly is good all the time. If He has given you a promise, keep expecting! Keep walking in faith that pleases Him. Trust Him! The answer to your promise can happen any day! Or it might not happen at all this side of eternity. But it WILL happen.

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God. If you would like to receive Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

October 7, 2015 by Laura Diehl 2 Comments

How Can You Shatter the Darkness of Halloween?

There are so very many opinions about what to do with October 31^st in the world of Christians! It runs the spectrum from churches having haunted houses in their basements to families hibernating in their basements with all of the lights turned off so no one thinks they are home.

shatter the darkness

I was actually referring to myself, as I have personally run the entire gamut on this! Growing up in the 70s as a pastor’s kid, we had Halloween parties at our church, complete with the referred to haunted house in the basement.

When I got married, we decided (based on teachings we heard on the demonic purpose of the event) we would have nothing to do with it. One year we thought we would just leave the house and go out to eat, but discovered we couldn’t escape it that way, because all the restaurant workers were dressed up and trying to draw our kids into the “excitement”.

halloween 7 Over the years, we have done a variety of things. We have rented a movie for the kids and huddled in the basement eating pizza with all of the lights off so no one would come to our door. We have been a part of different harvest festival “alternatives,” and for a few years we actually handed out candy with special Halloween tracts (which my youngest son loved doing because he saw himself as a missionary.)

There are so many directions I could take this article, but for now, I would like to share something a good friend and mentor, Becky Fischer, Founder of Kids in Ministry International, has written about the “holiday” of Halloween.

Here’s an EXCELLENT question I get asked all the time: “When we talk about not participating in Halloween, people bring up Christmas and Easter, saying they are Pagan as well…how do you ‘defend’ that?”

My answer: One of the biggest differences I see between Christians celebrating Halloween versus Easter or Christmas, is Halloween continues to be all about the devil, death and darkness. There’s NOTHING redeeming in that holiday that Christians can run with. But Christmas and Easter are interesting because Christians completely stole those pagan holidays back from the devil and made them PURELY about Jesus. There’s NOTHING about Halloween that is about Jesus.

Even the ungoldy world identifies Christmas and Easter as Christian holidays and know it’s about Jesus. Halloween…not so much. My big issue is Christians who have tried to “sanitize” Halloween by making a Christian version of it with their Fall Festivals and Harvest parties. That’s not redeeming the holiday! That’s NOT taking it back or stealing it from the devil. That’s us hiding our light under a bushel so we don’t have to face the darkness! We just pretend it’s not there…

That’s why something set me on fire this year with the concept of Oct 31 being “SHATTER THE DARKNESS DAY”! It’s not participation—it’s speaking LIGHT INTO THE DARKNESS.

Meet people in the culture where they are at. That’s what Paul did when he gave his big speech at the statue of the Unknown God. He didn’t say, “You nasty Greeks! Worshiping idols!” No! He used it as a platform to preach the gospel, “I have good news for you! I know this God, and I can tell you He loves you.”

You might be interested to know that the music to the old hymn Amazing Grace was once a worldly song sung in the pubs by a bunch of drunks. John Newton put Christian lyrics to it and it became a gospel classic. But no Christians ever complain that we shouldn’t sing Amazing Grace because it was originally an ungodly tavern song sung by heathens. (But then that’s maybe because so many Christians have no issues with bars and taverns any more. But I digress…)

Take back what the darkness has stolen! We can’t stop the culture from being the culture. It is what it is. So our answer to every situation is the word of God and bringing Light into every event and every conversation. The truth of God’s word is an answer to the darkness.

LET’S SHATTER THE DARKNESS ON OCTOBER 31!!!!!

I’m getting ready for my own personal “Shatter the Darkness” party on Oct 31. Got my white Christmas tree lights to outline the front of my house. Got a large Styrofoam tombstone that I’m going to break in two with a big poster that says “Jesus Defeated Death.” I’ve got a couple of little internally lit pumpkins and I’m going to put a sign by them that says “Jesus is the light in my heart.”

Here are some other ideas I have for signs: “Zombies can be born again through life in Jesus.”

Or “Say the Name of Jesus and scary things leave!”

How About: “Vampires are powerless against the blood of Jesus!”

Or maybe “Monsters, zombies, vampires, ghosts and demons tremble at the name of Jesus!”

“Jesus is the light who overcame the Darkness”

…I’m going to pass out lots of candy, I am going to give them a CD copy of my salvation message for kids called the Gospel Pumpkin, and tell them each, “God bless you!” as they leave. I have a male manikin at the Fire Center that I’m going to bring home, dress up like Jesus, and stand him visibly in my dining room window with one of the signs. I also am going to place a boom box outside in the yard and play songs like “God’s Not Dead He’s Surely alive” by the Newsboys.

Now before I get any tongue lashings about churches halloween 8 doing carnivals or “Trunk or Treat” events and such, telling me how we have to be a light in the darkness and offer an alternative to our unsaved neighborhoods, please hear me. The body of believers I am connected to has a very effective carnival every October 31^st.

And now after revealing that, I will probably get a tongue lashing from those who believe you cannot call yourself a Christian and have any part of Halloween whatsoever, including validating it with an “alternative” event.

The thing is, every Christian I know bases what they choose to do for Halloween on their personal interpretation of specific scriptures.

I am so grieved at how incredibly divisive this has become in the lives and churches of Christians. May I remind us all of three very powerful scriptures:

Romans 14:4-6 Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand. One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it to the Lord; and he who does not observe the day, to the Lord he does not observe it…”(NKJV)

1 Cor. 10:29-33 …For why is my freedom being judged by another’s conscience? If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for? So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God— even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved. (NIV)

John 13:35 By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. (NKJV)

I fully realize this article will probably spark some very strong emotions and scriptures presented in the comment section, and that is great, as long as there are no words of judgment and condemnation. Make sure what you write is with a heart speaking in love about what God has shown you.

Remember, we all have blind spots, not one of us has this Christian thing figured out perfectly. We see dimly through a glass. Please respect the process God is doing in all of us. And remember, no matter what you do or don’t do, Jesus is still Lord over the date of October 31^st!