Walking with God in such a close, loving, personal relationship in which He pours out His love into our hearts and speaks His desires and directions into our thoughts changes everything about our world. Our values are different, our views are changed, our priorities shift. Many noticeable differences are apparent to others who have known us.

God loves failures. When Adam failed, God protected him and Eve by removing them from the Garden and providing the basics they needed. When Moses failed, God still honored him in front of the people. When David failed, God gave him options and accepted him when he repented. No matter how much of a mess we make, regardless of how short we fall, in spite of our shortcomings and failures, God gives us another chance. He takes us back, not as damaged goods, but as honored members of the family, privileged, accepted, showing His grace, letting others see they, too, can be restored.

God calls us to a straitened path. He bestows His boundless love on us, He rains His mercy and grace over our lives, He attends from heaven to our whispered prayer and faintest cry from the heart. This bountiful, extravagant outpouring of heaven's resources into us is given freely, liberally, ungrudgingly so that we can extricate our lives from the mud-hole we have been mired in, from the rock-pile we ended up high-centering on. Once we are back on the path, all wheels are on the pavement, we move forward, following the rules of safe traveling.

​Hope and joy is so abundant in the promises of God. Even in the judgment and doom that God required Jeremiah to pronounce over Israel and Judah, there was always the promise that in the midst of the judgment brought against the nation for the sins of the political and religious leaders and their adherents and followers, God does not lose sight of individuals. He promises again and again that those who mourn for the sins of the country, who bring their offering with an humble and contrite heart to the Lord, who seek justice for the poor and needy, will receive from God not only provision for their needs but for the needs of widows and fatherless that they help.