I watched the scene before me. All else a background blur.
A young couple with small boys was leaving the birthday party I was attending with my own two small children. The dad swung the youngest of the two boys effortlessly onto his shoulders while grabbing on securely to the waiting hand of the older one.
It was perfect.
And as tears rose up from the deep places of my sadness, choking me… I was reminded that this perfect story was not my story. At all.
I turned from the scene blinking back tears and fighting to release the tension in my chest. Like every other event, I would leave this party alone with my children. And there would be no firm hand to hold or waiting shoulders to sit upon for them.
As a little girl staging many a Barbie and Ken wedding, I knew what was supposed to happen. But what didn’t happen for me. No. This was not how I imagined it. And if you were to have told me what my life would look like during one of those carefully arranged Barbie weddings, I would have put them back into their pink Barbie case and cried bitter tears.
In truth, hope had become an unwelcome word to me. Why?
Because I didn’t believe in it anymore.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Roman’s 15:13, NKJV
So how do we hope in a God who doesn’t seem to care about our dreams? A God who allows our children to be the only ones at the party without a daddy to snuggle them
up safely into his arms for the ride home?
How do we hope at all?
The answer is simple. We can’t.
Our hearts are too broken. Our dreams are too shattered. Our loss is too heavy.
And so when I read the first words of this passage, my eyes fill with grateful tears.
May the God of hope fill you…
I see that this is something which is done for me. And not something I could ever do for myself. And do you know what? All these years later, my two small children grown, I’ve discovered something I never made a plan for. That Jesus is the one with the firm hand and the waiting shoulders.
And He was all along.
Something deep inside of me changed. My vision shifted. And I knew something I hadn’t before.
That His love carried me. It protected me.
And it never left us.
As daughters of God, we can have hope always–
In every moment.
In every circumstance.
In every heartache.
We can have hope… because He is our hope.
