The Treasure of Hope

I’d like to end this series with what I think is the most important treasure we can have out of the riches we find in waiting, and that is the treasure of hope.

It can be hard to wait. Waiting can feel like forever. Waiting can make you wonder, it can make you crazy with impatience, angry with frustration, sick with fear. Job waited for relief. Samson waited for vengeance. Joseph waited for God’s will to be shown.

Sometimes waiting can be a crush to our spirits. I think about my friends at Union right now, trying to start the recovery and clean up process today after such a horrendous tragedy hit the campus last night. It can be discouraging and overwhelming to think about everything it will take before the campus is back the way it was. Time, money, materials, manpower. There is a long stretch of waiting ahead.

There is a lot of waiting that comes with a deployment. You wait for it to start, you wait for it to end. And there are moments where it sometimes feels like it will never end. And yet you wait. Because there is no other option.

But waiting in itself implies something. You expect, you anticipate, you look for… you hope. You hope for better days, wish for clearer skies, look forward to the sunshine instead of rain. You put your hope in a day that will be different than the one you’re living now.

When I was living through our deployment last year, I never thought, “God, why are you doing this to us?” I always thought, “God, what are you trying to teach me from this?” That doesn’t mean I went through that year with a constant smile on my face. Hardly. It was hard, and it was grueling, and it felt like a marathon that would never quit. It also doesn’t mean that I woke up each day ready to learn, pen in hand and notebook at the ready. But I had hope. I had the assurance that one day this waiting I was living would end. One day, a finish line would be crossed. One day, a whistle would blow and there would be time to catch my breath.

I believed that because I believe God is God, and as long as He is, so is our hope. Because when everything else is unsure, God is the constant certainty. When everything else is precarious and threatening to crumble down around us, whether it’s at the hand of a tornado or a friend who hurts us or a deployment that separates us… God is still God. We can wait because we have the hope that eventually, things will get better. And if things don’t get better, if life hands us lemons the size of grapefruits every day for the rest of our lives, we still have the hope that God is here with us, walking us through it. I am not alone. You are not alone.

So as you walk through this waiting, my prayer for you is that you will not wish it to pass quickly, but instead, glean from it like an old prospector panning for gold. Don’t pass off the dust and dirt and grime you walk through as trash to be discarded. Sit down in the dirt and carefully sift through those emotions, those frustrations, those fears and search for the treasures. The treasure of quiet. The treasure of tears. The treasure of focus. The treasure of hope.

Take joy in those gifts you find as you travel the journey. And remember that God takes joy in you.