hope

"Because even if he killed me, I’d keep on hoping." (Job 13:15 MSG)

This verse gave me pause in my reading yesterday morning. I'm familiar with the same verse in the King James translation: "Thou he slay me, yet will I trust in him", but the idea of "hoping" in difficult circumstances seemed to somehow add power to trust. 

To trust is to believe, but to hope is to expect. I should trust God to be with me and strengthen me in hard times, but I can also hope that things will get better and expect good to come out of my circumstances--be it personal or spiritual growth, opportunity to minister to others who are in a similar situation, confidence, etc. 

I was reminded of John Stumbo and his incredible story which I heard him tell earlier this month in Indianapolis. One day he was a pastor, a marathon runner, a devoted husband and father, and the next he was in the hospital with a mystery illness that destroyed his ability to swallow for the next 18 months. Then all of a sudden one day he could swallow again. He literally went out and bought a Big Mac the moment he realized he'd just swallowed his own spit for the first time in a year and a half. And he had no trouble eating the whole thing. 

In the book of Job, there are lots of questions. Curiously Job takes the loss of his family and fortune in stride, but after his health is affected he wants to know why. Why, God, why? Yet in 42 chapters God never does answer Job's questions. He simply reminds Job that He created all things thus Job should trust Him.

While I was reading Job I heard the news that a woman I went to high school with was killed in a car accident on the icy roads just a few miles from my home. Her five-year-old son was in the car with her but physically appears to be fine. 

Sometimes there are no answers to our troubles, our difficulties, our circumstances, or why bad things happen to good people. Just the other day a 90+ year-old told me she was "ready to go". So why did this 30-year-old go and not her? Why did Pastor John have to deal with this affliction and not a drug addict or child molester? Often times the only answer we have to "why" is "I don't know."

EMBRACE HOPE. 

Because even when we don't know, we can trust the One who does know.

Reading Undaunted by Christine Caine, in which she shares how the difficulty she has endured in life--sexual abuse, miscarriage, adoption, getting lost in the wilderness and having to be rescued by helicopter--has enabled her to bring hope to thousands of victims of human trafficking.