I've been thinking a lot about hope lately. HA! What am I talking about...I've been thinking about hope all year. It was the word that I choose for this year. (read more about that at an earlier post...Thoughts on 2010). It's been a theme that keeps coming up again and again without me even trying! I finally finished reading the Allure of Hope that I talked about earlier and already feel the need to reread it again. It's easier to not engage with my desires, to not engage with the longings, to stifle them down and to distract myself. But that's not living. That is just surviving and existing and sometimes that is all one can do. I've been there but it should be only a season and not a way of life.
"Our desire for more (the very thing that got us in trouble) becomes the place through which God finds our hearts. He turns our desire on its head to reveal to us that everything we want as women is found in Him. All we can be as women is found in Him." That is where my hope lies. In the place where I enter into the depths of my heart and express the desires that lie there. The desire to be loved, to love, to share life with someone, to make a difference in this world, to be working a job that makes my heart come alive and to be a woman that loves the Lord with all her heart no matter her circumstances. And maybe it's that last one that God is perfecting in me. But I will keep engaging with my desires, keep clinging to hope and trusting that God hears, listens and cares. Because if I don't, it's like I'm committing soul suicide. Hope.
I have seriously been thinking lately of getting a tattoo on my wrist that says hope. As a symbol and reminder to myself to keep hoping. To keep feeling the weight of the desire of the things I hope for Though a friend of mine told me that getting a word tattoo on my wrist is such a Christian clique and kind of made me super sad about it. I don't want to be clique. There is reason and meaning behind why I want to do it. Hope beyond my circumstances. Hope that God is going to do something with my life. Hope that God is going to meet me right where I am. Hope that He will use everything in my past and future to bring Him glory and be used in other people's lives. Hope that I can continue to trust this statement in the moments when I mess up. "God seems to be more concerned with our trust that we're being led somewhere, that He is taking us somewhere because of His love for us, then He is concerned with a flawless record along the way." I am being led somewhere, sometimes it's just not where I think I want to be or in the timing I want.
<-------- I have to remember this in those times I think that I can't keep going. In those times that I wonder why does my life have to be like this. And I am SO thankful those days are much more few and far between than they were two years ago or even a year ago. It's funny cause a number of people have called me strong the past couple of years and I laugh. Strong? ha. It's cause I've had no choice but to be and it hasn't been in my own strength. I refuse to let hard circumstance determine how I feel about my life. And if God thinks I can handle this life He's blessed me with.....well then who am I to argue?
