Hope

Now that I am a "weekend blogger", I think of things all week that I'd like to process here, but then when I sit down, I think, "What were those things?" So, regardless of what I may have been thinking about all week long, right now I am thinking about HOPE.
------------------------- Sara Groves has a song I love, not sure of the title, but the chorus goes like this: "Hope has a way of turning its face to you just when you least expect it. You walk in a room and look out a window and something there leaves you breathless. You say to yourself it's been a while since I felt this, but it feels like it might be hope."
------------------------- This song came on the other day when I was praying for someone I love, someone who needs to walk in a room and look out a window and see something that leaves them breathless. We all have to have hope, we have to. The enemy suggests to us that if we hope, we will just be disappointed, and we don't want to go through that pain again, right? But we can't stop there or we'll just become so cold. Our hope can't be in a plan or an idea or in any one thing, noble or not, that we think we must have or have happen; our hope must be in something, Someone, much more worthy of our hope. When we have lost hope in the Lord, as stark as it may sound, it is because we have expected Him to be something that He is not (or has not chosen to show about Himself YET if we are biblically sound in our hopes.)
---------------------------------- There are several statements I could make that describe what I think this time on earth is all about, and those beliefs get me through. One of those statements is: We are here to be given chances to believe, to hope, to grow a mature and simple faith through the difficulties of this short life. If our offering to the Lord is faith, and we know biblically that it is, then every crappy thing that comes our way can be seen as an opportunity to respond in blind, ridiculous, happy hope. Hope in getting a great job or getting perfectly healed or having no problems with our children? No. Hope in the Lord, His Word, His intrinsic goodness, and His personal love for us.
---------------------------------- I want to die a foolish person of hope, hanging on with a grin to this idea I have of Jesus: that He is waiting for me with open arms and there is nothing, not cancer, not bankruptcy, not any worst case scenario to be imagined, that can change that fact. Our family is and has been facing suffering; there are so many questions, but I am helped by Lamentations 3...
"When life is heavy and hard to take, go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. Don't ask questions. Wait for hope to appear. Don't run from trouble. Take it full-face. The "worst" is never the worst. Why? Because the Master won't ever walk out and fail to return." Lamentations 3 (The Message)