Rejoice!

Some of what I have been trying to say in bits and pieces of my blogs I found in a perfect summary. I read this, and immediately wanted to share it! I was reading "Rejoice" by Karen Kingsbury and Gary Smalley (book 4 of the "Redemption Series") and the first three chapters made me so nauseous that I didn't want to read anymore. Even though these books have such a real grip on understanding the truth of God's love through real life scenarios, this one just got to me. If you know me, you know that I struggle with fear and worry. I have to constantly be on guard for satans attack on my mind. Anyway, I still wanted to read the book, but I had to know if everything worked out...so...I skipped to the end. When I was looking through the end notes to get back to the story I caught this...

"God understands grief. Jesus wept when he saw the crowd's response to Lazarus in the tomb. Death, illness, and painful trials were never God's intention for his people. Since the fall of man, it has been the way of the world. But even so, God gives us a way out of the misery.
Be joyful! Rejoice always!
This doesn't mean you'll never cry. To the contrary, if your heart is soft for God, you'll cry often. You'll weep when it's your turn to stand vigil at a hospital bed, or when you stand there on behalf of someone else. But if you make a decision to rejoice, then deep inside you will always have a reason to go on, a reason to get up in the morning. Your grief won't be that of a person without hope; rather you will grieve because pain and death and tragedy are sad. Very sad. But you will have hope because you believe the truths that go along with faith in Christ. God is in control...He has a plan for everyone who loves him...Death is merely a door for those who believe in him...And he will make good out of every situation.
See?
What other response could we have to that kind of God but joy?"
-Gary Smalley

This was at the back of the book as "A Word from Gary Smalley." It really spoke to me and it is the truth. This world is scary and bad things have been happening all over the place, but we 'Rejoice' because our God is King and for whatever reasons that we don't understand it is all apart of His perfect plan! But, that is why it is so important for us to 'relate' to one another to get through the 'hard' of life and to love one another....and why we need to be saved, so that we can be with that God for eternity because there will be one day soon that we won't grieve, be scared or worried or cry, but REJOICE and sing and dance and laugh in our new glorified bodies with hopefully our loved ones! He told us these things in the bible for a reason...so that we can rest.