High Apple Pie, in the Sky HOPES!

Illustration by, award winning artist, Donny Finley
 from the soon-to-be-released, Secrets of Shiloh,
A Christian Storybook for families

“HOPE deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is the tree of life.” Prob. 13:12

            In the 60s, my brother and I had a stack of 45-records and a little player concealed behind our living room love seat. One of the songs we listened to in our little “hide out” was Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes”:

Once there was a silly old ram

Thought he'd punch a hole in a dam

No one could make that ram, scram

He kept buttin that dam

Cause he had high hopes, he had high hopes

He had high apple pie, in the sky hopes

So any time your feelin bad

Stead of feelin sad

Just remember that ram

Oops there goes a billion kilowatt dam

All problems just a toy balloon

They'll be bursted soon

They're just bound to go pop

Oops there goes another problem kerplop

            Considering my storybooks, some days I feel a bit like that silly old ram butting my head against an impenetrable dam between success and me. But today, I have HIGH APPLE PIE, IN THE SKY HOPES!

            Is confidence in my own abilities the grounds for HIGH HOPES? NO WAY!!! Quite the contrary in fact!!! HIGH HOPES for successful storybooks comes only from great confidence in the One who commissioned me to write, BECAUSE…

“Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass” (1 Thess. 5:24), 

                                                         and 

He “is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works within us” (Eph. 3:20).

What has God commissioned you to do? PRESS ON, my friend, with HIGH HOPES in HIM.

“I’m sure now I’ll see God’s goodness in the exuberant earth. Stay with God! Take heart. Don’t quit. I’ll say it again: Stay with God!” Psalm 27:13-14, The Message

Azalea Blossom, by Donny Finley