DiAnn Mills @DiAnnMills
Guest post by: Kristen Hogrefe Parnell @Kristen Hogrefe Parnell
One of my favorite Bible verses as a teenager that remains close to my heart as a thirty-something is Luke 1:37. “For with God nothing will be impossible” (NKJV).
Read through the stories of the Old and New Testament, and you can’t help but see impossible situations become possible. For starters, consider this short list of women in the Bible.
- A ninety-year-old woman conceives and gives birth to a baby (Sarah).
- A Gentile prostitute helps Jewish spies, eventually marries a Jewish man, and becomes part of the lineage of Jesus (Rahab).
- A young Jewish woman is chosen as the next Persian queen and saves her people from being slaughtered (Esther).
- A teenage virgin bears the Savior of the world (Mary).
These women all found themselves in impossible situations with solutions made possible only by God’s miraculous intervention.
Sure, you say, those stories are well and good, but God isn’t working miracles today. In some respects, you would be right, but in others, you would be seriously wrong.
Consider, for starters, the enduring truth of John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (NKJV). Everlasting life made available to any eternally condemned sinner who believes in God? There’s a miracle for sure!
People continue to come to Him today, because the Lord is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The miracle is that God is still drawing us to Himself, even when we feel weighed down by our mistakes and scarred from our past—much like my character Jayna in Hold Your Breath.
Jayna has searched for love in all the wrong places, and her last misplaced romance proves more dangerous than she could have imagined. Despite her poor choices and wounded past, God pursues Jayna, using an unlikely church group and a big-hearted private investigator named Liam Bracken to redeem her story.
Yes, her story is fiction, but God’s never-ending, pursuing love for us is not. He is still in the business of changing lives and turning impossible situations into something good.
Sometimes the blessings we take for granted today are because of how God moved in our past. How have you seen God work in your life?
Kristen
Kristen Hogrefe Parnell writes suspenseful fiction from a faith perspective for women and young adults. Her own suspense story involved waiting on God into her thirties to meet her husband, and she desires to keep embracing God’s plan for her life when it’s not what she expects. Kristen’s books have won the Selah Award and the Grace Award, among others. An educator at heart, she also teaches English online and enjoys being a podcast guest. Kristen lives in the Tampa, Florida area with her husband and young son. Visit her online at KristenHogrefeParnell.com.
Thank you, Kristen!
