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Her road has been long.

A friend of mine has a husband whose cancer treatments were at last beginning to show signs of promise.

Something about her question to me struck my heart: “Is it okay for me to hope in this? Is it okay for me to hope in something other than God?”

Maybe I felt my own heart bleeding.

Even now, as I approach two years since I knew we were leaving Africa, something in me has been scrabbling for purchase. I felt (still feel) an Africa-shaped hole, jagged-edged, toothed. Today, as I wait to hear back from publishers on book proposals I’ve sent out, I’m realizing there’s a good level of wanting, and a bad one.

It’s good and healthy for me to long for a new way to use the way I’m made, a new way to work alongside God and feel that purpose coursing through me like electricity. It’s good–of course, of course!–for my friend to hope for her husband’s healing. For her kids to have a dad.

But It’s distinctly unhealthy for either of us to make answered prayer our light and salvation.

What He Doesn’t Have to Do

God doesn’t have to explain his math to either of us.

It might be tempting for someone to say, “Well, it makes sense that God would bring you back to the United States if he was going to do that!” Oh, I get it now!

But aren’t God and his purposes so much more complex than that? And doesn’t God deserve to rule beyond what my eight-pound brain can understand?

In Africa, I saw so many beautiful Christians who truly love and believe, but haven’t added that (American?) element of associating God with their own version of success or healing or happiness. God was not their golden ticket to prosperity and endless green lights. He did not make them Teflon, so nothing bad stuck. He was not their cosmic vending machine: I put in enough faith/good deeds/etc. You give me what I put dibs on. 

The Thing with Feathers

Emily Dickinson once called hope the thing with feathers. I feel it now, beating in me as I wait for a “yes” in my own life. In fact, when it’s not thrumming in my ribcage, things are eerily quiet.

But whatever I hope for will never be enough. As C.S. Lewis wrote,

Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.*

A “yes” to what I long for will always, always fall short. But God? Never. All the promises of God find their Yes in him (1 Corinthians 1:20).

As in, God’s “yes” is not always where I want it. It’s in him.

Keep Wanting

Yes, go for it: desire. Hope. Long for. Pine.  Let it pulse in you. (If you don’t believe me, make sure to check out this post.) To not hope or desire is more of a Buddhist way of thinking.

But God gave us hunger, gave us longing: He humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.

Sometimes I get nervous when I hear people saying x won’t happen because God’s a good God. Or that they are trusting God to do x. 

Why? Because I have found God’s definition of what’s necessary–of the bread I need–to differ vastly from my own at times. 

(When you trust God to do x and he doesn’t, what happens to your faith?)

God is, indeed, good. But his happy ending may not be witnessed in my lifetime.

Maybe my answer to my friend (and to myself) would be a bit of semantics. Yes, hope for! But don’t hope in.

What’s Your Ring of Power?

A woman once wrote J.R.R. Tolkien, highly skeptical of a chapter in the Lord of the Rings. She asked for Tolkien’s explanation of the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed, and with it, the Dark Lord’s entire power evaporates. She found it too unbelievable that his seemingly unquenchable power would be utterly erased by such a small object being destroyed.

But Tolkien explained to her that this was a metaphor for “the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself.”**

What’s your ring of power? What, if it comes to its demise, will make you implode? What, if you don’t get it, means faith-death?

If that which is precious to you doesn’t happen, can God really be good or trustworthy or sovereign?

My desire can be beautiful to God. He let you hunger and fed you. …As long as that desire is properly ordered (see Romans 1:25). As long as God is in the place of God–my power, the light in my eyes–and my desire falls subject to him.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God. (Psalm 20:7)

 

*Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity.

**Keller, Timothy. Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York: Penguin Books (2013). Kindle edition, p. 169.

 

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