With almost zero segue from the topic we had been discussing breezily moments before, I wrote that “I realize the application site has changed and now shows the waiting list, and therefore I assume that means the trip is full, so I just wanted to thank you for considering my application, and maybe next year will be my “next right thing” in God’s plan.” I hit send and burst into tears.
I’ve realized the last week or so that while I am absolutely content with a ‘no’ if that is the best plan and is how God wants to roll on this, I am having less success letting go of the desire to get a ‘yes’. To see that email in my inbox that invites me to tag along merrily across an ocean. I have realized that I wanted this trip even more than I thought I did. I’ve held it lightly in my mind, but my heart seems to have jumped overboard and headed right for the sirens. I cannot convince my heart not to hope. I am in the situation of being able to let God decide this for me, and not feeling a desire to push for it, manipulate to try and make it happen, yet at the SAME time having this deep desire in my heart that I am in mourning for and trying to lay down, while it seems to want to keep getting back up out of the grave and follow me home.
Hope is dastardly if we don’t know how to handle it. It’s terrifying if we can’t (spoiler: we never can) see the future or the timing or the reasons why that lie in front of us. All I can hope in is this, that God knows exactly what and when He’s doing, and He’s not going to allow me a single tear drop that is not absolutely necessary. For now, I ache and I’m restless and I don’t know what to want or what to do with what I want.
We can be completely convinced that God “works all things together for good, to them that love Him and are called according to His purposes”. (Romans 8:28) and that He gives good gifts to His children, and withholds nothing that is for their good and His glory. The problem is when the outcome of our desires could go either way, that’s where faith comes in and our reasoning has to sit back and sigh and wait, and trust that we don’t know exactly what that working out or those good gifts actually look like, even though we feel like we do.
So I will continue to hold this heaviness, this call to still hope despite the answer looking like an almost definite no, and continue to also daily give the desire and confusion and ‘pending-ness’ to Him to hold and to use, and see what happens.