Ninety-nine point nine days of the week, I choose hope.
During these past several decades of living by faith in a God who is a good and faithful Father, and has continually proven Himself so, I have come to know I can have full confidence in Him. He is who He says He is, and He will do all that He has promised, no matter how my circumstances may appear.
But today, as I mark thirty days spent mostly in bed, too weak and exhausted to leave our house and land (except for a couple doctor’s visits), I’m having one of those rare days in which despair keeps tugging at my shirt-tails, whispering in my ear.
I’ve had those brief periods of feeling a bit better – yesterday I was able to get out in the sunshine and weed a bit of the garden for half an hour – but it’s been impossible to make any plans that involve going anywhere or exerting sustained energy.
Still, as strange as it may sound to you, there is an odd beauty in the rawness that overwhelms me. It’s difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced suffering over long periods of time, yet I often return to meditate on this mystery. When we allow ourselves to feel it, right there in the midst of our deepest pain and darkest despair, there is an ache – a yearning for our God and that perfectly intimate relationship with Him – that is so profoundly felt.
That relationship that I was created for. That you were created for.
Yet throughout our days, we frantically fill the yawning void within us with busyness, with human relationships, with “stuff” that briefly gratifies, with white noise. We don’t want to feel the depths of the ache. And how incredibly deep it is!
When I have these days where I am at the end of myself, and no “feeling of hope” rises up within me; when all my fight is spent and my little box of “secrets to coping” is empty, that mystery comes alive. Like a wound whose scab has been picked away, the sheer sting of it exposes my nakedness.
I am nothing without Jesus.
And though many will declare healing and wholeness over me, and I too will not abandon my hope in the One who has promised, there is a beauty in this very raw place.
Have you ever felt it?
I think about Abraham.
“In hope, against hope, he believed…” (Romans 4:18)
“Without becoming weak in faith, he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead…” (Romans 4:19)
When we examine our circumstances – the hopelessness of our situation, the very appearance of death where the Father has proclaimed life – it is there that we discover a hope that defies explanation. A hope that, against all probability, is grounded in confidence in His divine promise.
So today, as I feel the ache in my soul, I am grateful. For when I sink to the depths of my own brokenness, it is there that I encounter Jesus in a way that those whose lives flow along quite smoothly may never experience. To me, it is a wonderful grace – a mysterious gift that continues to transform me.
Awesome are His ways and I will never stop praising Him.
