As many of you know who are a part of A Strong Tower Ministry, we had an amazing blessing this week.  Our dear friends and founders of this ministry were blessed with a beautiful baby girl, whom they appropriately named ‘Hope’.  I have known my friend Craig Redd for several years and in fact, we originally met in the maximum security prison of Sterling Correctional Facility.  As I recall those days they were filled with doubt and despondency, for me anyway, but taking God at His Word I endeavored to serve God beside Craig.  What can I say that would even begin to penetrate the most ardent heart?  Here I sit some ten or twelve years later a free man having been blessed with a number of miracles in my life as well.

Hope is a word that is often misused, seldom truly lived up to, and very often responsible for a great deal of heartache because we put our hope in the wrong things or people. We are all looking for things that inspire us to be better and to achieve more, and yet, is that really what hope is suppose to do?  As I examine the Biblical premise for hope what I see is a loving God promising to give us life in the face of death and suffering.  That is true Biblical hope! It is trusting in God to do for us what we cannot do on our own!  When I consider where Craig and Wendi have come from, both from a prison cell, and I see what God has done in their lives, I am overwhelmed with a sense of possibility and my faith is renewed to believe God for just about anything, including a resurrection from the dead.  Coming from Sterling Correctional Facility is indeed, just that!  Who could ever deny that A Strong Tower Ministry is a beacon of hope to men and women, who not only have been incarcerated, but who have been beat up by the world?  This beautiful baby girl and her amazing arrival into this world is proof that God is still in the business of giving new life to those who will seek Him and who will lay their gifts, feeble as they may be at His feet, and watch what God can do when we simply make ourselves available to Him.  Thank you Craig and Wendi, and thank you Hope! Your life is a life granted from above and maybe your arrival is a simple reminder to us all that we also are suppose to live in a way that inspires others to believe in the God of infinite possibility and hope, and that no matter where we may find ourselves in this journey, it is never too late to have a little Hope of our own!