Finding Hope In The Least Likely Of Places

Today, I rode my bike out to the intersection pictured above.

I used to not be able to ride this far. The chronic pain from endometriosis and the exhaustion and the muscle tension from anemia made it impossible.

For several years, my kids asked over and over again - “Could we ride our bikes out to the lights and watch the city trains go by?” but I just was never able to say, “Yes”.

I simply did not have the strength to do it.

For years, I thought about this intersection and felt ashamed. It became my white whale. It was out there, taunting me, this unreachable goal that others could grasp with ease but I could not. (I cannot stress enough how close it is to my home.)

Have you ever had something like that in your life?

The intersection was a symbol of all the ways I felt my illness was causing me to fail as a mother. It reminded me of all the things my illness was taking from me - especially these younger years with my kids.

But, today, I rode out there with energy to spare. I rode out there because the intersection is now a symbol of something else.

When things in my life feel unmovable, when things are beyond my power to fix and mend - I ride out to this intersection and stare at it.

I watch the train go by and I think about the surgeries and the grace of God that has allowed me to bike this far. I think about I used to believe I would never be able to bike to the intersection and how I am living something that my imagination could not imagine. This intersection, once a symbol of shame, is now a reminder that things can change.

It is now a symbol of hope.

Hope isn’t always found looking to the future. It can be found in looking back, in remembering how God worked, healed, or resurrected something that you felt was dead. Difficult things from our past can become beacons of hope for our future, through the beautiful work of Jesus.

Sometimes hope looks as ordinary and ugly as a not-yet-prairie-spring urban intersection.

Sometimes hope can look like a cross and a tomb.

Two thousand years ago, on the darkest Friday, the cross did not look like hope for those who watched Jesus breathing his last breaths.

The knowledge that Jesus was in a tomb did not bring hope and comfort to his disciples. They were living with the reality of their deep unfaithfulness to their dear friend. And now Jesus was dead. Judas had taken his own life. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome were bringing spices of death that Sunday morning. Everything they were hoping for was buried and sealed up in that tomb with a rock no one could roll away. The cross and the tomb were all darkness.

No one had any idea what the cross or the tomb were going to mean.

How could they? Nothing had happened, in all of history, that was remotely close to what was about to happen.

The good work of God is often beyond our imagination.

What we see as darkness might just be, in the future, a reminder of hope because God is in the business of making good out of bad.

Romans 8:28 is a verse people often quote to explain away difficult circumstances but it is also misunderstood. We take “good” as representing material possessions or the absence of suffering for those that love God.

But hear it again. Paul writes, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Paul is telling the Romans, and us, that our hope is that God is in the business, all the time, every single moment, of making good out of darkness. He can resurrect the dead.

He is able to make anything into a symbol of hope through the power of His work, in Jesus - even the horrible Roman execution tool of the cross and the tomb that followed.

You might be facing something, like me, that feels unmovable by human standards. Or perhaps something feels broken beyond your imagination.

Let this Holy Week and Easter remind you that what we see as darkness might just be, to our future selves, a reminder of hope.

As we head into Holy Week, may the hope of God carry you forward through whatever it is that you are facing. And may God give you insight into how He is working to bring hope into your world.

May all those things that seem like tombs become places you draw hope from and reminders of God’s almighty power and unwavering faithfulness to you, His beloved.