Thursday, October 2, 2014

Remnants of Hope

It's the middle of the night... or, the wee hours of the morning, depending on your perspective, I guess. I am frowning at a note I wrote in reponse to Anne Frank's musings about seven months ago...
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ― Anne Frank 
Okay Anne Frank, I am taking your advice once again... sitting here in the dark sorting out my thoughts with my fingers on a back-lit keyboard. The seven other people whom reside in this house are asleep, leaving me to conversations in my mind with names that appear in my overcrowded AOL inbox, across my neverending Facebook feed, inside the e-books of my Kindle app, and between the random observations tweeting through the home page of my Twitter account.
I am thinking about what I would like to tell God - that I am tired of enduring, of waiting, of trusting. I would like to tell Him that I am doing everything that I have found in my path, and that I am ready to move to the next part of life, because being in this part for one more day cannot possibly accomplish anything more than it already has. I would like to ask Him what it is that I am doing wrong, so that I can get it right and come to the end of this waiting...
Seven months later, I am still here, weary... still tired of the enduring... way over the waiting... and in a neverending struggle with the trusting. If I were not forced to be here by my circumstances, would I stay here in this place that feels somewhat like suspended animation? Would I endure if I had a simple option not to? Would I wait if there were a "rush delivery" available to fix all of my problems? Am I actually even trusting like I think I am supposed to? When people say things like, "I don't know how you do it," my inner voice replies, "Do I even know how?", because I really do not think that I do. I think perhaps that God keeps me here in this place in my life, and that He may be the one doing the enduring... patiently waiting for me to finally learn the lessons He has for me, to somehow grasp the wisdom He offers. Maybe He is graciously allowing me to develop the strength and self control to make the choices on my own to trust and endure and to wait for the good things, even if suddenly I were faced with deceptively lovely options that would lead me down a different path than the one He knows is the best for me. Maybe, just maybe, what might appear to me as being restrained by my circumstances from progressing forward is actually the reality of me being held in the arms of God my Father to protect me from a world that I am not yet ready for.

As my mind wanders over these complicated thoughts tangled throughout my drowsy head, I think of another quote I recently read...
“Events may be horrible or inescapable, but people have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold
And perhaps Lois is right. It is true that I may not be choosing to endure at this point in my life, I may simply be enduring because a bit like the way the apostle Paul was physically imprisoned, God has not allowed me an escape from this emotional confinement. Even Paul from his prison cell said that always we have the choice of how to endure. Life and marriage and really, any relationship is about a constant adjusting and adapting of our attitudes and our perspectives of the things we find ourselves either in the midst of, or even just touched by the edge of.  
"Now your attitudes and thoughts must all be constantly changing for the better."
-Ephesians 4:23
I have spent the last six months trying to hang on to the hope we had been living with after my husband's surgery in the six months prior to those. I have spent the last ten weeks looking at the remnants of that hope as he left behind one treatment and moved towards something new.Yesterday, we held that new hope in our hands, afraid almost to see it, tentative in trusting that the something better that is to come could possibly be here. Yet, I do hope... because I am confident that no matter my lability of attitude and no matter my struggle to always comprehend the process, my God is always perfect and always loving and always kind. Because of that confidence in His goodness, I can hope for good things, even not knowing with certainty when or how they will come. 
"Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see."-Hebrews 11:1
"So be truly glad! There is wonderful joy ahead, even though it is necessary for you to endure many trials for a while. These trials are only to test your faith, to show that it is strong and pure. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold -- and your faith is far more precious to God than mere gold. So if your faith remains strong after being tried by fiery trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world. You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him, you trust him; and even now you are happy with a glorious, inexpressible joy."
-1 Peter 1:6-8
God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good. 

I invite you to hope along with us.