Hope Hurts

Matthew and I were talking in the car about my aching heart and waiting to be matched in our adoption, and I said, “I don’t know if I should just mentally prepare that it will be another year, or keep hoping.  Hoping is painful.”

Since that little conversation I have felt God showing me hope in the scriptures.  So I decided to dig deeper.  I did a study on the word hope, and I focused on the Old Testament.

I am addicted to this word and the meanings of it.  For all it represents and for how I am hoping onto hope—how I am bearing hope.

Here is what I found.

Hope is mainly translated in these ways in the Old Testament:

• ·         Expectation
• ·         Refuge
• ·         Trust
• ·         Wait
• ·         Be patient
• ·         Something waited for
• ·         To writhe in pain or fear

That last one especially made my eyes grow big in wonder.  God knows.

Hope is complicated.

It is full of expectation.  The kind that feels like sparkling water inside my chest.  Hope is a refuge when I can’t figure things out.  I hide in the refuge of hope because it cradles my heart’s dreams.

Hope is trust.  Trust in a God I cannot see and the promises I cannot see fulfilled.  Hope is to wait. Oh, the agony of this wait. Yet, if there were no wait, there would be no reason to hope because it would be already here.  So hope is truly something waited for.

But hope is not without pain or fear.  Indeed, hope is to writhe in pain or fear.  It is to tremble and travail.  This wait leaves us wounded and grieved.  Shaken.  Yet in the same painful hope we tarry, stay, waiting, trusting.  Because hope is all these things.  In this pain and fear we learn patience—which comes from this experience we are in—which leads back to hope.

And despite it all, hope does NOT disappoint us because God has pour out His love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit Whom He has given us (Romans 5:1-5). 

And one day, this hope of writing pain and fear will be hope that dances.

The depth of the word HOPE is assuring.  All these feelings I feel with hope are real and validated here.  Hope is complicated.  And hope does hurt

But I hold on. 

Because hope does not disappoint. 

May you too, hold on to hope even though there is pain in this waiting and expectation.  Do not give up.  Trust and wait in the refuge of God and know that your patience is not in vain.  God is pouring His love into your heart through the Holy Spirit during waiting and hoping…and remember God has said that hope does not disappoint.  Hold on to hope.  Hold on to God.