THE HOPE & TOAST RECIPE

Hi guys, i really really disturbed a friend of mine to write this cool article for me, so enjoy.
==================================================================================
Sometimes it just ‘kills’ you doesn’t it?: How do you know that all those dreams, all what you hope to be, all you want to accomplish and the desires of your heart would be granted?
I mean what if we are living in a fool’s paradise and twenty years from now………yeah you know where I am going.
It ‘kills’ me too sometimes! Doubt, fear (of the unknown), anxiety and worry creep behind my back sometimes. I’m so certain that this is everybody’s experience at a particular point in life (if it isn’t so y’all can email me or drop something on my facebook wall so I can seek professional help.lol!)
I need not tell you that this feeling and its questions are regular visitors in our minds especially at this point in our lives when we are most ambitious: young and the world is ours for the taking, right?
Let’s talk about HOPE. Now this is not some self-help concept. I know that the word HOPE is a common term in our everyday language, but the word HOPE I’m talking about is the one that features very prominently in the New Testament of the Bible. In the original language in which the New Testament was written (Greek), it is the word Elpece and it means: to anticipate usually with pleasure; expectation or confidence.
I believe strongly that what connects our present to our desired future is this HOPE (Elpece). Wait a minute, what about faith?
In the past four weeks, I have discovered that I’m in love with toast (last April/May it was Diet Coke). So for breakfast, I like to spread some butter across my bread and put in the toaster and in five minutes or less, ‘my love’ is out (fast and easy to fix). I had never given much thought to the butter, until it finally hit me today: what makes my toast so great is not the temperature or the crispness of the bread but the butter in-between (talk about an example of awesome revelation)!
It’s that way with Faith & Hope. Faith is the toast; Hope is the butter that makes it so great even though we don’t see it. So really Faith is the concept but Hope is real-deal in between. “Now Faith is the substance of things HOPED for……………” (Hebrews 11:1 kjv, emphasis mine).
God is a God of hope and all he wants is for us to trust him. Heard that before, right? Well here’s another dimension: Romans 15:13 tells us that God fills us with joy and peace in believing. Now we all could use some Joy & Peace. In the context of the passage, Joy simply means a calm delight; Peace is simply quietness and rest. A combination of this two is irreplaceable.
God knows that sometimes we get worried and anxious especially when our current reality is far from what we crave for. For example, we believe God for a university degree and we’ve just failed our third entrance exams, as a lady you trust God for a family, you aren’t even married and you’re not exactly very young anymore, to mention a few. In those moments, Joy and Peace by the Power of the Holy Spirit (power of the Spirit of God) carry us through.
God NEVER disappoints. Sure, we might not get what we desire immediately, but in between God would correct our motives, calm our anxiety and make us develop character and in the end always delivers more than we asked or imagined in the first place (Ephesians 3:20).
So when those creeping questions and fears come, what do we do? We tell them to get lost (literally), we speak out our testimony: God is working it all out, everything is alright and Joy & peace is our portion by the Power of The Holy Spirit.
It is not our responsibility to create peace and Joy in our lives, they come as we release our concerns to God, and trust him. Some of us hold our questions and fears very dear (unintentionally) in the name of caution or being realistic. But we’ve always lived that way and much hasn’t changed, has it?
Let’s all make a switch! Embrace God, trust him with EVERYTHING including our dreams, our plans and our innermost desires no matter how weird they might sound to the rest of the world, just tell him and trust him. At the same time, don’t go killing yourself for all the answers, just live one day at a time trusting God, maintaining the right attitude and giving whatever God has placed in your hand your best shot.
If you ever forget all these, just make some toast and as you eat it, you’ll remember the lesson (trust me).