The meadow was beautiful and so was the morning. The sun shined above me, to my left was a small pond created by an ingenious little beaver dam, and directly in front of me was a small, lively stream bubbling its way to a nearby creek. There were birds singing, ducks quacking, and the occasional turkey gobbling in the trees. It was like a little piece of Heaven on earth.

And as I sat there in the green grass of the meadow taking it all in, I glanced downwards just in time to see a huge hairy spider come crawling across the grass just inches away from me.

Fun fact about me--I love meadows and sunshine and beaver dams and little streams and wildlife. That's why I was there that day. But I hate spiders. With a passion. They scare me half to death. I can truthfully say that I would rather eat a worm than touch a spider. So when that spider showed up, my little taste of heaven on earth came to an immediate halt as I went scrambling backwards towards safety.

But after I regained my senses a little bit, something important occurred to me. It occurred to me that this is life.

In life, very often the good and the bad and the merry and the scary, they all tend to come right together in a mixed up and unpredictable jumble.

I think it's important to be honest about that.

So important, in fact, that I didn't even squish that big hairy spider. I just let him go on his hairy merry way. It was worth him wrecking my moment just for the life lesson.

Very few of us are strangers to hard times. And yet we always manage to be surprised when they come around, as if they are somehow out of place in the midst of our otherwise perfect lives. But as I think about it, living as if bad things are unexpected and perfection is expected is somewhat absurd.

It's like sitting in the wild grass of a spring-time meadow and expecting never to see a spider.

I think that if we're going to live our lives wisely (and i am all for that) then we need to learn to not live them as people who claim entitlement to impossible perfection. Instead we need to live them as people who claim something far more realistic, and far more powerful than that. We should live as people who cling to a hope that is bigger than the best and worst that life has to offer. A hope that is, in fact, bigger than life itself.

The story of those who expect only good things in life is always the story of disappointment. But the story of those who build their lives on hope in God is something else entirely.

No doubt everybody is going to have hard times, and sometimes impossibly hard times. But people who put their hope in God get to experience those hard times differently. It is the difference between living life as a victim of uncontrollable circumstances and living life as a willing soldier in the army of the world's greatest general. There will be hard days. But victory is guaranteed and our cause is worth it.

Today you may be basking in the sun or balking at the spiders. In either case, my hope that you have the courage to hope. Specifically, I hope you have the courage to put your hope, your trust, in Jesus, who died for your sins and then came back to life so that He could give you new life.

He’s not going to make all the spiders go away. Not, immediately, anyway. But He is going to take care of you, and never let you go. And whatever happens, He’s worth it.

And so are you.