Searching For Spring By Christine HooverSample

Day Three

Cultivating Hope

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:12

Beauty often unveils itself slowly, through much waiting, much seeking, and sometimes much heartache. 

Because the most beautiful beauty—a transformed life—takes time, we must be patient, lifetime seekers, not only mining our past and present circumstances for beauty but also cultivating a hope for future beauty. 

Perhaps that longing for future beauty is why I find it difficult to fully comprehend beauty in the present. When I’m holding my husband’s hand across the table on our anniversary, for example, I’m overcome with joy. But then fear creeps in. What if he’s taken away from me? What if the future holds dire and difficult things for us? In the present moment, I cannot escape my distractible emotions. All is not yet beautiful.

And so we have an opportunity that will vanish when all is made beautiful: the opportunity for faith. We may not be able to see and comprehend all God is doing in the present, but we can trust that one day it will be beautiful.

This is the pattern of Scripture. In the Old Testament, God required his people to build altars, recall stories of his acts to their children, and celebrate feasts that marked the miracles he’d done on their behalf. Over and over, he said to them, “Remember.” 

Then, as the drumbeat played on, God’s refrain through the prophets became, “Look forward.” They were to look forward to a perfect deliverer.

The writers of the New Testament point back to the death and resurrection of Christ and then forward to his future coming, all so that we’d look at the past with gratefulness and awe, the future with faith, and the present with eyes wide open to beauty. 

Look back. God has created and God has come.

Look ahead. God will come again.

As we look at how God has acted and is acting, we know what we must do and how we must live in response. And so we explore how faith—waiting for All Things Beautiful—is lived out in real life. 

Why? So you can live alive today, you can know rest and peace, you can face whatever you’re facing with hope, you can do the work you’ve been given. So you can obey even though obedience costs and even hurts sometimes. So you can see beauty rising. 

In what ways has waiting for something to be made beautiful increased your faith?