What would others who know you say characterizes your life: despair or hope? Okay, likely it is some of both, but we all tend to lean more to one or the other.

Years ago, we were invited to dinner at the home of one of Marcia’s students, a Russian physicist who was learning English. We enjoyed a delicious meal and the company of our gracious hosts. After dinner, I asked the husband how Christian churches were doing in Russia. He quickly advised me that he was a scientist and engineer. He said that he was proud to believe only what he could see and touch. I also shared my belief in the one true God, who loves us so much that He sent His Son Jesus who came to pay a debt He didn’t owe because we owed a debt we couldn’t pay.

In the course of our conversation he talked more about the science of atheism and I shared more about the loving God who created science. And after some while, I felt that we would just not come to really understand each other. But then he made the most interesting and revealing remark. He said, “You know Bryan, there IS one thing you Christians have that we atheists don’t. You have HOPE.”

How many of us get so comfortable with our own pain, grief, sense of self-reliance and hopelessness, that we become numb to the possibility of discovering real hope for living better now and eternally!

The message of Go Light Your World is that there IS hope, that God’s best for you is available now. Yes, there WILL still be pain and sorrow and grief, and maybe even cancer, in your journey. But there is also real power for living beyond the problems and circumstances that beset us.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”
2 Corinthians 4:7-9