Notes on Hope Devotional

Hard and Good

Isaiah 43:19 NIV
See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.

When you are in a hard season, it’s almost impossible to see beyond it. Death, divorce, or a diagnosis throws us into an abyss of the unknown. We wonder if there is hope on the other side. Our brains are in a juxtaposition; the hard place we are currently in, and the good that awaits us beyond. What if there is something in the midst? What if where we are is exactly where we are supposed to be?

While in my online writing group, a young woman asked us if we had heard of a word, agathokakological (¦a-gə-(ˌ)thō-ˌka-kə-¦lä-ji-kəl). I definitely said no. She gave us the definition from the Greek, meaning, good and bad together. Having a word that I can hardly pronounce to describe what much of life is was profound.

This verse in Isaiah appears to offer a glimpse of being in the midst of a hard season, while waiting for good to come. Wilderness and wasteland do not seem like ideal places for growth to take place. Yet, it is where something new awaits; “way in the wilderness, and streams in the wasteland.”

It’s right in the midst of the hard place, where we are, that we can wait with hope for God to do something new, unexpected, and different from what we have known. There is a process of something new being formed out of, in the middle, coming from, while we are in a hard season. There may be a question, like the verse offers, “Do you not perceive it?” Doubt doesn’t diminish what God is doing. There is hope in the middle of the hard and good.

Dear Heavenly Father,
Thank You for making a stream in our deserts, a way in the wilderness. Help us cling to You in the process of waiting in hope for the new thing You are doing.
In Jesus Name, Amen.