Horrendous ending, sweet beginning,
How do we connect such disparate things?
All we need do is have faith in
Jesus,
And out of that hellish ending hope he brings.
And out of that hellish ending hope he brings.
***
Every time I’m
blessed enough to have to recount my testimony of how God’s love broke through
into my life and heart, I’m captivated all the more just how our Lord turns
death into fresh life.
On the scrapheap
of life – apart from the love of my beautiful daughters and parents – that was
how it felt – I could do nothing else but take God at his promise. I had
nothing else; no back-up plan; no idea how to live without hope.
The worst thing –
to be blindsided and to lose the life I’d taken so much for granted – was the
best thing that could have happened. Suddenly I was forced to start all over
again; it was a go-back-to-the-start-and-don’t-collect-your-$200 moment.
At the End is the
Beginning
Only if we can
foresee hope is there any hope at all. Such a hope that is vacant at a sordid
end is buoyed only by the one thing: faith.
Faith will take
us from this horrendous ending into that sweet beginning, but the process of
such a faith never feels good at the time. Only afterward are we assured that
we took the right way by simply believing good things would happen if we were
patient and gentle with ourselves.
At the end is
the beginning if we can hold on to the only hope we have: Jesus.
When Jesus said,
“Take heart, I have overcome the world,” he was saying that we will not have many
of the answers life will require of us. We will be bereft. Forlornness will
overtake us. It’s an important juncture, the end. It ushers in something new,
life-transforming, yet dire and so incredibly soul-defying.
At the Beginning is in
Sight, a Better End
We can only
serve God, and derive such joy in doing so, if, when we are sent back to the
start by God, we do go back to the very start and establish no such resentment
for going back.
What is
humiliating is not that by design; God brings us back to nothing only to
rebuild our identity, our personality, our character. It’s a blessed rebuild.
***
At the end is
the beginning if we can hold on to the only hope we have: Jesus. Our Lord can
do for us what we could never do for ourselves.
There’s a bright
beginning available in brokenness. The best faith emerges from hopelessness.
© 2014 S. J. Wickham.
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