The Hope Factor

  Recently I read a Japanese proverb that says, ‘ We can never see the sunrise by looking toward the west.’ As I considered the meaning of these words, I imagined myself as a young child, watching a sunset for the very first time . . . I stand on the crest of the hill and watch the sun lower against the horizon, painting the sky in bold strokes of scarlet and gold. Over the next hour, these colors only become more glorious as the sun sinks, suspended above the rim of the earth. My chest swells with silent awe as I await the climax. Never have I seen such beauty. Each moment is more perfect than the last. I lean back and bask in the light. And then, so slowly that I don’t realize it at first, the sun slips below the horizon, and the colors begin to fade. I do not understand. All of my excitement and anticipation is abruptly extinguished as dusk closes in, and the first stars wink slowly in the pale evening sky. No . This cannot be what was supposed to come next. Crushing disappoint...

  I’ve been thinking a lot about wilderness seasons recently. I know so many people who are coming out of them and others who are right in the middle of them. One of my dear friends recently told me that she had been going through a spiritually dry season, and although she was coming out of it, she missed the closeness she felt with Jesus in it. I wanted to grab onto my friend and just shake my head and say, “Yes. I get that. Yes, yes, yes.” I’ve been through a lot of wilderness seasons in my almost twenty years of life—a lot of really long, hard seasons of struggling. I feel like though, especially for the past year, my perspective on my journey through those hard places has really changed.  Before, I saw wilderness seasons as just a miserable place to be in that held no purpose.  Now, I realize that those seasons are only purposeless when I view them as a waste of time rather than a place to encounter God in.  And even though I don’t miss those times of just f...