Why is it that negative circumstances so often speak more loudly than positive ones? It’s as if they hoist megaphones to gleefully scream: TROUBLE! FAILURE! IMPOSSIBLE! LACK! RUIN! DISASTER! DEFEAT!

Their goal is to kill your hope, your faith, your expectations of good on this Earth we share, and thereby extinguish the life that could be yours.

On discouraging days, tune out the voices of cruel, mocking, arrogant circumstances — they are the words of an assassin — and refute deceptive rhetoric with truth:

God is a shepherd to the sheep. His ferocity is directed at marauding wolves, not his dependent charges.

To the vulnerable, he is gentle. He does not scream, he whispers. He does not accuse, he commends. He does not deprecate, he encourages. To the defenseless, he does not destroy, he builds. He does not take, he gives. He does not smother, he preserves. God does not kill, he creates…