How to Overcome Life’s Challenges with Faith and Hope

Update: 2025-09-25

Description

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Your Hope-Filled Perspective, my guest Bill Derrick and I share how to navigate life’s unexpected challenges with faith and resilience. Drawing on powerful biblical principles, we discuss how to trust God in the midst of life’s storms and find restoration and hope when circumstances feel overwhelming. Our conversation dives into practical tools for facing adversity, embracing God’s peace, and emerging stronger through trials.

If you’ve ever wondered how to hold on to faith when life takes an unexpected turn, this episode will inspire and equip you to trust God’s plan and find hope in the storm.

Quotables from the episode:

I was also learning about the curse of success. When you're very successful, you feel like you could do no wrong. And you feel like you've got all the answers. And I had to learn that neither one of those points were necessarily true. I also had to learn that, yes, I'm in control until I'm not, and now I'm not in control anymore. And last of all, I had to kind of learn that my priorities, because of success probably, had gotten out of whack.
When somebody asks you, “what's your priorities?” You automatically say, "Well, that's easy. God, family, and business." I think during this time, my priorities of success now, not necessarily when things went bad, but when we were very successful, one might look at the priorities as being more like “business, business, business, and then God and family, because we were doing well.”
Just stick with it because the storm will end. It may not end the way you want it, but it will end and there will be blessings that you will find because of the storm.
From a practical standpoint, as leaders, when you do your planning, you plan for success. You don't necessarily plan for what happens if we fail? That's a hard thing to do as a business leader. From a faith standpoint, we're told in the Bible to build your house on a solid foundation so that when the storms come, we don't get washed away. So from that standpoint, I think that's how you can prepare: you go into these storms on the right foundation of faith and trust in God.
I was realizing that God had just spent five or six years preparing me. I mean, you know, it sounds a little weird, but I was prepared.
I said, we don't know what we were ready for, but we're ready for it and I don't know what the future holds but we're ready to move forward and because I knew that God was going to be there.
I feel a calmness, a contentment, that brings me at peace with my situation.
I am so grateful for a lot of things and I tell people don't be like me and have to get to the point where things start to be taken away from you for you to be grateful. Being grateful can change your life.
First of all, don't ask the question, “where is God?” God is there. The first question we need to ask is, "Where am I?" And lean into God. He doesn't necessarily cause these things, but at the same time, He uses them for our benefit. And if we can just get our minds to that point to where we understand that and we can say, "All right, God, I'm along for the ride. I'm going to do what I can, but you're driving and I need to let you take me where you want me to go."
Unexpected circumstances can upend our neatly planned life at any time.
God is always there. The question is, do we trust Him enough to help us through the storm by His means and His way?
I am amazed at how blind I was before the storm and how God was working in my life.
No matter what your circumstances, no matter what your age, no matter what your physical or mental situation, no matter how tragic your experience – believe and trust in the Lord.
We all have a choice to make when the storms of life assail us. We can blame God and get angry, or we can let Him take control and trust Him.
When things are stripped from our life, it helps lead us back to where we can trust God for our future.
The storms we face in life don’t always end the way we want nor when we want them, yet they are often unwanted gifts from God.
When things are stripped from our life, it helps lead us back to where we can trust God for our future.