When our dreams seem to go sour or remain unfulfilled, hopelessness can dominate our lives-or we can hold on with open hands, knowing that we have hope because God is faithful.

My times of silence before God are very important to me now. I put everything else down, every word away, and I am with the Lord. When I'm quiet, life falls into perspective for me. I have a very active mind and I'm a worrier, but in those moments when I choose to put that away, I rest beside the Shepherd in still places. Why don't you give yourself a gift today? Turn off the television or the car stereo, put down the newspaper or the business plan, and in the quietness, rest for a while beside the Shepherd of your soul.

Lord God, I long to hear Your voice but not just secondhand through teachers, as wonderful and godly as they can be. I long to hear Your voice firsthand.

When I work with Women of Faith, I probably talk to anything from 15- to 20,000 women a weekend. They are dying to hear somebody tell their story out loud and not self-combust, to bring all the secrets out of the shadow into Gods light.

But the witness of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is that God's most difficult promise has been kept.

Some people will not understand what the love of Christ compels you to do; do it anyway.

If we mistake God's silence for indifference, we are the most miserable of people. If we give up when we no longer understand, we reject His caring, steadfast love and cut ourselves off from our only real hope.