This too shall come to pass

 Do you ever wish that where you find yourself right now would get over? Stop for a minute and reflect back to another time in your life when you felt the same thing. You didn’t stay there.

I remember a Sunday, years ago, just after my parents divorced, I was sixteen. I thought I was going to go live with my father because he had promised me that I would. But that had only been a lie to keep me while the divorce was going on. I didn’t know it then. He had no intention of taking me with him. I loved my father more than life itself. So, when he said he needed me to stay with my mother, something still in me wanted to please him far more than let my own feelings be expressed; I relented.

My mother and I had no transportation at the time. We were solely dependent on either my sister who had gotten married by that time or my father who only came to take me to the grocery store once a week. My world was very bleak. I was a sixteen-year-old girl who should have been living a carefree life filled with promise and hope.

On this particular Sunday, my sister had promised that she would come and get me and Mother and take us out for the day to a piece of property where they kept their horses. I was so excited to be able to get out of the house. She had told me to be ready early so that her husband wouldn’t have to wait on us. I had a bag packed for the day, told my mother to also be ready and we were up at 7 o’clock.

I sat anticipating seeing my sister pull up at any moment. Seven o’clock came and went. Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, and still no sister. No phone call either. By now my mother had made coffee and found a book to read. I sat at the window slowly dissolving into a broken mess. Every car that came around the corner and passed my house sent me further into a pit of despair. All day I refused to lose what little hope I had. My mother tried several times to get me to find something to do. It was evident that my sister wasn’t coming and even if she did it was getting so late in the day.

By ten o’clock at night, I was still sitting looking out that window. I had gone through every imaginable emotion from anger to deep discouragement. It was days later that my sister finally called to say that her husband had wanted her to run errands and was getting more irritated with her as the day went on. This explanation did nothing to soothe the pain I felt. Days after that I found myself still tied to those feelings. I just didn’t seem to be able to move on.

That was over fifty years ago. At that time, I was sure my life would never change. I felt that I would be stuck right there in that rejected sixteen-year-old life of mine. I was convinced that nothing was ever going to change.

Well, life did change and throughout my life, there have been other times that I thought I would always be stuck in. I lost hope as a child and it took me years, with God’s help, to gain back hope again.

Now come to my present time. God has made some promises to me of things that are coming. I remember a few times in the Word when God made promises to people. Here in Genesis 18:10 Then one of them said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”

Sarah was barren and had no children. So reading this was for me like my sister promising to come on that Sunday.

Another scripture was of a woman called Hannah who also had no children and while she was crying out to God in the temple, the priest Eli heard her and thought she was drunk. When she told him that she was not drunk but sick in her soul and explained why, Eli told her to go her way and that God would grant her whatever it was she was asking for. 

1 Samuel 1: 20 So in the course of time Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel saying, “Because I asked the Lord for him.”

Both of these situations must have seemed hopeless to these women. So much so that even as they walked year after year the desire only grew greater, and they weren’t getting any younger.

Now that I find myself years into walking with the Lord I can look back and in looking back at times I thought would never change, I see that nothing came to stay—it all came to pass.

When we all find ourselves in times, we think will never change we need to remind ourselves of those times we didn’t think would change and yet they did.

Even though God restored my hope, over the years, I still have to remind myself not to let the present situation cause me to lose hope. God is working on our behalf even when we don’t see things changing.

I’ll leave you with this. God is always ready to encourage you and talk with you. In fact, He desires to have time with us every single day. He is a God of all our today and also of our futures. He has a place He is longing to bring us into not just one day in Heaven but here and now.

Maybe you feel stuck, but get still and listen for God to say, “This has not come into your life to stay it has come to pass.”

I bless you.