Sometimes I look around me and I see how terrible people are to one another. It can be politically nasty–Lord knows that’s everywhere. We just don’t seem capable of understanding that people are different, but that doesn’t mean they hate someone else.
Also we are killing each other for various reasons at unheard of rates.
We take things from people because we can.
We hurt people, perhaps because in some way that makes us feel better about our own pain.
We prey on weakness, including that of children.
Sometimes our words cause as much pain as our fists.
We forget kindness, even everyday kindnesses.
And it seems like there is no hope and we are just whiling away our days.
It’s like the desert, where I work and live. So unmercifully hot, and barren, and sparse.
There is this one area at a particular test site, where there is gravel spread out across the ground, and twisted metal from various things–relics of a time gone by. There is rust, and damaged wood, and a couple old chairs.
Old garbage, long forgotten.
This place seems forsaken, and bereft of hope.
But there’s this one spot, and it makes me think of hope. It makes me think of beauty from ashes when the rest of the place makes me think of waste and uselessness.
Tiny flowers, purple, fragile and beautiful reach out from the rocks, in the midst of nothing of use.
I think that’s us sometimes. We don’t feel useful, we don’t feel beautiful. We’re waiting to die.
Yet like these flowers, we can reach out of the rocks and detritus of life. And when we reach out of those rocks, we find there is a hand reaching back to take ours.
We don’t have to lie under a pile of rocks, and there IS hope, no matter what the world may look like, and sometimes is.
The hand reaching out to you and throwing the piled rocks to the side belongs to Jesus, who knows a thing or two about how hard it gets.
Don’t despair–things will turn around. Hold tightly to the promises made by God. He has plans for you (Jeremiah 29:11).
Cling to hope, even when all you see is rocks.
Hebrews 10:23 “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.”
A Work in Progress 