Mid-life Crisis

A friend and I were talking recently about the battle for hope. At the time, we were both at what could possibly be called a mid-life crisis. For me, the crisis came from the fact that I finally realized I had very naïve notions about what the good life in Christ would look if I made all the “right” decisions. I have always expected a “good” life. If I made the right Christian choices, God would honor them by giving me physical blessings. Instead, Christian maturity teaches me that God is good, and that is supposed to sustain me when life is not.

When thinking today about the hope I’m supposed to have, I found this verse.

Ps. 33:17 The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue.

Even as a Christian who was raised in the church, I cannot believe how many different “warhorses” I have looked to over the years in hopes of rescue. My warhorses are always linked to some type of circumstantial change—but they NEVER rescue me the way I expect. They are always a false hope. They let me down every time.

The Bible talks about hope IN God …

Psalm 39:7 “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you.

… and hope FROM God.

Psalm 62:5 For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.

The Bible uses the term hope differently than we often use it in English. The Hebrew word for hope is also translated expectation. I get the idea of sitting in the middle of my struggle and looking longingly for rescue. But where do I expect this rescue to come? My problem has been first that I look to the wrong things for rescue and second I do not necessarily recognize rescue when it comes. From past experience, I know that God’s choice of rescue is both unpredictable and consistently better than my visions of rescue, but I cannot predict His mode of rescue for the future.

I am learning that only God can rescue and am aware of the futility of setting my expectations on anything or anyone else. I still don’t know exactly what rescue looks like. To summarize, I often don’t really know what I’m looking FOR, but my hope is that I do definitely know Who I’m looking TO. And that makes all the difference.