The older I get the stranger hope is. The more I don’t understand it, the more I know I am not going to make it in this world. When I was 16 I claimed the verse “If we hope for what we do not have, we wait for it patiently.” It was mine, that is what I will do. But then I had things I was sure the Lord wanted for me not pan out the way I thought God said. But then my greatest blessings were born out of deep sorrow, and dreams dying that I thought were going to live forever. Hope is tricky, and when I hold it too tight I end up putting the gas on and slamming into a wall over and over again that was never meant to be broken down for me. But hope is the ladder that has me scale the wall, or the arrow written in chalk that suggests this is not the way to go forward. I didn’t love it when I found out the theme for the mudroom was hope, but I think I needed to work through some of this.

At 26 I was miraculously healed, but at 13 I started asking for healing. Sometimes people wonder why more people aren’t experiencing miracles, and I wonder sometimes if it is because we don’t understand how expensive hope is.

I spent most of my teen years believing I would be healed. I went to every healing service, I had hands laid on me more times than I remember. I believed, every single time, that this was the time the Lord would have mercy on me. But it wasn’t. So many of those times it wasn’t. Walking to the front to have hands laid over me was like climbing the ladder of a high dive, only you aren’t totally sure when you are leaping, if the water will be there to catch you. Every time you do it again, add two steps to the ladder.

There comes a point in time when you just stop climbing the ladder, you stop believing in the healing, and you start figuring out how to live with the body you have. This isn’t to say you can’t function well and also believe that healing will come, it is just that that is often a lot, especially if you are functioning in a body that is also sick.

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