And a Child Shall Lead them...

"Hope is a Bastard."

 

...I am often heard saying.

 

It is.  Hope for what your heart really wants and you will likely be disappointed.  Unless...

 

Unless, as Brad said, sitting on my couch: "Unless your Hope is in Christ.."  Unless it's in the one thing that does not, that cannot, disappoint.

 

I take a hard look at life these days and it seems I, as usual, need to be kicked in the actual teeth before I use my spiritual eyes.  In a world where decay and wrinkles and death and heartbreak and betrayal and cancer are inevitable, I have been shown reasons to hope.  Redemption is all around us, if we would look.

 

God is teaching me hard lessons to grasp, in relatively easy ways.  Comparatively speaking, that is.

 

A little Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (or Supernanny..love it!) sometimes are all it takes to make me recognize how easy peasy I have it.  Talk about some REDEMPTIVE TV. 

 

A little 8 year old gal who had been fighting cancer just found out that she has it again.  A little spitfire girl, who, the first time around, started saving her change and buying stuffed animals for other kids in the hospital who were fighting cancer.  So of COURSE they are gonna build that girl and her family a house.  GEEZ, I'd build this kid a house myself.  When they interviewed her this little girl without a single hair on her head and an inexplicable light in her eye, when asked where her energy came from, she said:  "We pray... A LOT.  I love praying, it makes me feel better." 

 

Accuse me of being over-emotional... or even naive, or even dumb, but when you have faith like a CHILD.  Like a CHILD with nearly incurable CANCER... When you aim at heaven... sometimes Earth gets thrown in.    Aim at Heaven and you spend your nickels and dimes on teddy bears for others, and you also heal.  Aim and Earth, and gripe about your lack of healing and you just have two kinds of cancer.  Aim at Earth and that is what makes you say things like "Hope is a Bastard".Or something like that.

 

Man.  God is Good. Yes, even the God who allows all things to happen, all tragedies to assail his children... all chemotherapy... of all sorts.  

 

Man can be good also.  We are not a hopeless race, doomed to destroy each other.  There is hope.  Even if it comes in waves.

 

There is also an Extreme Home Mansion for each of us in the hereafter.  Perhaps complete with every video game system ever conceived.  Perhaps something better.  Like a Citrus s Peach Fresca drinking fountain.   Whatever it is.. it will have my name on it, and it will...FOR SURE... make my eyes bug out of my head.