Those nail-pierced hands are my hope. Jesus didn’t have to keep the scars that He earned on the cross. They could have vanished on the morning He rose out of the tomb. But Jesus keeps the scars on His hands and in His side to show that death is still forever defeated and the grave still has no hold on anyone who belongs to Jesus.

That’s where my anchor holds. The port of piece is the place where I know that my future is secure as if it were already written. Because it is. If you read the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, you see that everything will be fine in the end.

It will be more than fine. It will be the best possible ending to one chapter in our lives and the beginning of a new story where we see that all our existence up to that point will have been like the preface and table of contents and the real story will start and each chapter will be better than the last and it will never end (with apologies to C. S. Lewis for borrowing his ideas).

The bad stuff isn’t forever. In fact, all the pain and suffering we will ever face are light and momentary when compared to the coming glory. Not to say that the pain and suffering are nothing. In fact, they are often more than we can bear and we cling in dependence to Jesus. But the joy and peace and victory on the other side will be so much greater and better and longer.

In the mean time, we have that anchor in the port of peace even while the storms rage.