You Are My Hope

After last night's tossing and turning and getting thoroughly enmeshed in the sleeping bag, I'm rather tired and not entirely sure how to say what's in my head and on my heart. I've been doing and learning so much that sometimes it all just piles up until I'm almost afraid to open the floodgates for fear that I'll drown in the deluge of my own musings.

These past few days have been especially difficult (sorry! I am apparently too happy and outwardly focused to write when I'm actually having an easy, breezy time in life) for reasons of their own, but this morning I opened up to my daily reading in Psalm 31 and was drawn to verse 24.

Be strong, and let your heart take courage,
All you who hope in the Lord.


I find it so, SO easy to wallow in my own miseries, misfortunes, and failures. I'm still learning how to walk in the balance of recognizing my sinfulness in the light of God's holiness but also humbly receiving His grace and love that have sanctified and are sanctifying me. Humility is such a beautiful characteristic when someone actually walks in it, and it is such a sweet thing to be able to receive from the Lord. Part of the difficulty I have been facing is simply the oh-so-easy downward spiral of navel gazing that forgets the purpose of outreach and even of life, which is to glorify God and make His name known throughout the earth, and focuses instead on some too slowly evolving inward landscape that can only become beautiful when it is left to the master gardener Himself. As I have been fixating on my flaws, I have felt weak and ineffective, willing to do what is on the schedule because I have no choice, but gradually shriveling up inside.

Last night was sweet though, like a refreshing breeze blown in off of the sea. It was the end of a long day, with daily morning team time, then evangelism, a game of Ultimate Frisbee, a hastily consumed dinner of tacos, and an evening youth service/ministry time, wrapped up at last with a worship gathering at the African-American Center on Yale's campus. I hadn't even really had much of a quiet time that morning because I was exhausted and frustrated, so by the time we got to the 10PM worship I was flagging.

We talked once about the tendency of binding things in the prayer room or during worship, then walking right out of that room and loosing them once again. That's kind of what I felt was happening between the early evening ministry time when I had some personal breakthrough even while praying and prophesying over high school students, then lost my grasp of it five minutes after we walked out the door. By the time we reached Yale, I was ready to curl up in Daddy's lap and cry on His shoulder for a while. The eternal question: how do we walk in what we have received when the revelation is so contrary to established habits and thought patterns?

But always, at the moment beyond hope, God sends His messengers to whisper, "Be strong, and let your heart take courage..." Our hope is fixed on a firm foundation that the storms of life cannot shake. He is so good to me, and I will rest in Him.