hope

Sometimes we Christians use a lot of words that we just vaguely understand the meanings of. Powerful, life-changing words that get overused and watered down. I think I finally got to understand one of them this week.

HOPE.

There's something so different about the lives of people who have actually surrendered them. The more people I talk to who are heading into major transitions in their lives, the more I notice the difference. The overwhelming Jesus-following answer to the question of "what are you going to do now" is, "I don't have any idea, but I'm so excited!"

I have absolutely no idea where my life is going. I don't know where I'll be going when I graduate or where I want to work or when I want to have kids or what degrees I'll be getting or what friends I'll have living close to me. I just don't know. What I do know is this: I've never been this excited or had this much peace about anything in my life.

God wants to give his kids big dreams. He can come up with more than even the craziest things I can imagine. It will probably be way out of my comfort zone, and way past what I would have picked for myself. I can't guarantee I'll be happy all the time, or that I will always know why. But there is this underlying hope inside of all of it that makes me know that it is going to work out. Not knowing becomes exciting instead of frightening. I can dream big and not worry about reality getting in the way. I can take chances and not worry that I'll come crashing down with nobody to be there.

Hope, then, is not a comforting excuse for complacency. It is a safety net that gets better the higher you climb. The more you have to lose, the more God can do with you. My hope is built on the only eternal thing, and everything else could and will fail me before I'm through. So I'm confident in that one thing, knowing that even my biggest failures won't matter in 100 years. I'm planning to set myself up for some of the best failures or successes because if I'm going to have them, why not get something great out of them?

Run farther, think crazier, listen more, fall harder, be passionate, follow through, worry less, trust more, forget the comfort zone, just have this insane hope that your future is only limited by the one who created it and HE usually stays just a tad bit outside your box.