Stone of Help
Alexandra Hoover
Testimony: His handprints are all over my story, and they are holding Grace, Grace, and More Grace.
A lot of the questions surrounding the goodness and character of God are ones that stem from what we believe about God and how we see God.
“God, I don’t see you here” is a sentiment we’ve all shared at one point or another.
But then, at some point, we realize that Jesus shows us who God is. He lets us see God.
And at that moment, the scales of our eyes fall, giving us new sight, new vision, and new life.
We couldn’t see before. But because of Jesus’ power to reveal God to us, we have new eyes.
Stone of Help
I remember the first time I could see in this way.
And I remember when I first noticed God’s clear hand over my life, even though I couldn’t pinpoint it before.
I was 22 years old, sitting in a Sunday service listening to the pastor share a message on the grace of God.
Though I don’t remember the sermon title, but I do remember one of the verses he was teaching from.
It was Ephesians 2:4-7, and I wrote notes on my church bulletin right away.
God gives a certain kind of grace that made all things new, not based on merit, but in love.
And this grace is a gift that has the power to bring about beauty from ashes, life from death.
Stone of Help
I spent many years wrestling with the tension of God’s grace and goodness in my life.
At times, I would look back at my life and wonder,
“Where were you when….” Where was grace in the chaos of my circumstances?
This wasn’t an easy question to answer until I began to understand what grace really means.
For starters, God’s grace flows from the essence of his being.
That’s something that isn’t just true about Jesus, it’s true about God from the start of the Bible to the very end.
I believe we’ve missed seeing God in our lives because we’ve not known what it is we’re looking for.
But with new eyes given to us by Jesus to see, we can learn to spot the moments of grace weaved in and through our stories.
Jesus opened our eyes to who He truly is, and once we see him clearly, well, we start seeing evidence of His work all over the place.
Stone of Help
I imagine your story has similarities to mine. Bills paid when there was no money left in the account.
Housing situations figured out when we had nowhere to go.
New friendships out of nowhere when we were lonely.
Fresh courage poured out when we were paralyzed by fear.
Where is God? When Jesus gives us new eyes, we can see and say with confidence—He’s everywhere.
His handprints are all over my story, and they are holding grace, grace, and more grace.
That’s what Jesus does. He’s God in the flesh, and he’s also an eye-opener.
He is the gift of heaven to you and me,
and when we are given the ability to truly see that gift, we can then see a million other gifts sprinkled all over our journey.
God has been there. We just needed the gift of sight to see His fingerprints—
the multitude of graces extended to us over the course of our life. And in Jesus, we are given just that.
2 Chronicles 6:41 KJV
[41] Now therefore arise, O LORD God, into thy resting place, thou, and the ark of thy strength: let thy priests, O LORD God, be clothed with salvation, and let thy saints rejoice in goodness.
Stone of Help
I scrolled past the picture-perfect photo of a woman with her family on Instagram and just about threw my phone.
No, I’m serious. I was mindlessly scrolling as I waited to check out at a store in the mall.
My kids were exhausted from the day.
I double-tapped the picture because I somehow want to prove to myself:
that just for a second, I was not the bitter woman who couldn’t stand to see someone else happy.
“How wildly unrelatable,” I thought. “She doesn’t get it.”
But was it this women’s job to be the space where I found comfort?
Did I need to only see the unraveling of someone’s life to feel like they could relate to mine?
Stone of Help
I suppose that, deep down, I wanted to know that others around me were experiencing the same nightmare of a season as I was,
the rejection, the marital pain, the lack of clarity and direction in my season of life, the deep sense of unworthiness.
I don’t think I was jealous of her life.
Rather, I believe the picture evoked the nagging feeling that I most certainly did not have much of anything together.
That my efforts to present myself anything other than tidy came up empty.
We spend so much of our time looking to relate and be seen by others, understanding, for acceptance,
to quickly find that no one can ever meet us the way our souls beckon for it,
that no amount of empathy can heal the depth of our wounds or fill the void to be understood.
And often, we rely on the circumstantial temperature of life to help us gauge how our hearts and minds should feel and be.
But what if we could find a better thermometer?
Stone of Help
Friend, we can. Because here’s the deal:
where that woman on Instagram can’t possibly understand every single thing I’m facing, Jesus can.
In Hebrews 4, Jesus is described as our “great high priest” who has the power to take his rightful place in the heavens because He’s unique.
Because Jesus is not just God, but God in the flesh, He has not only made it possible for God to be understandable to us,
but for our daily issues to be physically and actually understandable to Him.
In other words, He’s relatable.
He knows what it’s like to be us.
And He is not only an “up there” or “out there” God. But He’s also a God who came here, who comes close.
Friend, hear this: Whatever it is, Jesus gets it.
He is with you and for you and came to give you a way forward because he knew what your situation was like,
and He couldn’t bear to not walk through it by your side.
Jesus is your God, high and lifted up above you, and He’s also your brother-human in the flesh right by your side.
He is both, and there is no other God like that.
The One who’s God and the One who gets it. To what better place or person could you possibly lift your eyes?
Hebrews 4:14-15 KJV
[14] Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession.
[15] For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
Stone of Help
Also Read: God Remembered. – Diademng (thediademng.org)
Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you can do with a few pics to drive the message home a little bit, but other than that, this is fantastic blog. A great read. I’ll certainly be back.