Hope is fickle. There are days when it is so easy to embrace. I feel all warm and fuzzy. Peace envelopes me. Sunshine and roses are abundant. All is right in the world. Maybe things will get a little easier. Maybe things will fall into place and I won't have to try so hard. Maybe, just maybe.
Then I wake up in reality. Try as I might I cannot divorce myself from it. Reality is a cruel world often devoid of peace. It's not pretty. It's exhausting. It's cloudy and dark. All the flowers have long since withered and died. There are a lot of tears. Everything is ten times harder that it should be. Everything that is wrong with the world weighs on me. Everything that is wrong with my life crushes me. Every failure haunts me. And I sigh.
Reality is a fight to find my faith. Reality is where I claw my way out of myself and into the embrace of my Savior. It's the place of my deepest wounds and my deepest comfort. It's the place where my life becomes less about me and more about Him. Reality is where everything comes full circle. Where wounds collide with faith into a beautiful explosion of HOPE.
I'm pretty sure I can't have hope without a healthy dose of reality. Living in the tension between hope and reality causes a holy ache. I am soothed as I dive deeper into the illogical, and frankly sometimes bizarre faith that sustains me. It doesn't make sense. It seems hokey. Old-fashioned. Weird. Foolish. And without those things it wouldn't be faith.
Sometimes I get answers I like. Sometimes I get answers I hate. Sometimes I don't get answers. Sometimes all of those things cause me to ask more questions. I'm okay with that. I have faith that God knows more than I do. God loves perfectly. God's grace is endless. God IS. I am because of HIM and no other reason. It doesn't make sense. It just is.
Living between hope and reality is challenging but it's good. It's often painful. It's often joyful. It's a conundrum. It takes faith but faith is life to me so I do it knowing that life is a holy ache.
"In him we live and move and have our being."
Acts 17:28
Exactly.
