The Impossible Will Have Become True: Trading Fear for Hope in God’s Faithfulness

It is easy to feel like our present moment will last forever, that we are stuck in these in-between moments of chaos and despair, moments that feel mundane or desperately repetitive. It is easy to feel paralyzed in a groundhog-day pattern of routines, sure that the person we hoped to be fell asleep someplace along the way. Perhaps that person was pushed away because they took up too much space. Or maybe the places we found ourselves in held too much pain, and it was easier to hide than face the heartbreak. Perhaps we are simply afraid.

Personally, I am afraid of this kind of permanence. I am afraid of being stuck in despair, in routine, in relationships, in jobs that could potentially turn boring or, even worse, toxic. I am afraid that I will run out of creativity. I am afraid that the anxiety that whispers I am not good enough will never quiet down enough for me to move forward.

Not long ago, I moved for the summer from my home in Idaho to Pennsylvania, and then moved all the way back. As I drove through miles of farms, corn fields, rivers, deserts and mountains, I looked at the way that God tended this shifting landscape glowing under the sun and lapping up the rain. Sometimes through the hands of a farmer and sometimes from God’s hand itself, the Earth was taken care of as it shifted from one landscape to the next.

And as I watched the Earth change, I was able to notice the small subtle ways that that same thing was happening inside of me, too. As if God was telling me I was not stuck, but that deep within me, something was shifting. In the pain of transition and re-beginning, God is reassuring me that I am tended to, as God makes space for growth.

In Isaiah, it says:

“Behold, I am doing a new thing;

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

and rivers in the desert.”

Our God, an artist and a poet, is always making new things. What if we believed this was true about the daily work happening inside of us? What if we believed there was a canyon being formed by the river of our hearts as well? That in those small subtle moments when we believe we’ll never grow out of the fears that plague us, it is precisely then that God is faithful to come alongside and cultivate the soil of our heart, creating a place that can hold growth, that can sustain change. It is then that God watches as tiny seeds planted in the soil of our hearts begin to grow, seeds we didn’t even know were there.

Perhaps one day we will look back on the things we were afraid of and think to ourselves, I am not afraid of that anymore.

That the impossible will have become true.

Friends, this is the gentle way of the kingdom of heaven. In the wilderness of our hearts, God is carving out rivers of hope, highways that lead someplace beautiful.

Scripture for Meditation:

“For I am about to do something new.

See, I have already begun! Do you not see it?

I will make a pathway through the wilderness.

I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.”

— Isaiah 43:19, NLT

Questions for Reflection:

1.What would it look like for us to notice change in ourselves the same way we notice the way the Earth changes?

2. What would a spring of water in the wilderness look like in your life?

3. What might it feel like to give generous attention to that area? Where are you holding the back change God wants to grow in your life? Why?