Promise Traversal

“God, you are the author and perfecter of my frustrations”

That is what I penned once, a play on the phrase from Hebrews 12:2. I still do not know if it is a truthful statement, or a rebellious one.

I would imagine that it expresses well that which those who hear God’s voice often have to deal with. It always begins with a promise of something He wants to do in one’s life. We receive it with joy and wait for the immanence of the fulfillment of the promise – only to find, that circumstances are such, that the fulfillment of the promise is an impossibility.

This is not just the case in our lives, but even in the lives of those people we read about in Scripture. Here’s a few of them.

Abraham: Promised a son at 75 although Sarah (similar age) was barren – had to wait for 25 years for Isaac to be born.

David: Promised to become King despite being an obscure shepherd boy, and despite being actively hunted by a jealous monarch – had to wait roughly 15 years.

Joseph: Was told he would become a great man whom his family will serve – left for dead by his brothers, then became a slave, then a prisoner – had to wait 13 years to become elevated to the position of the highest official in Egypt (and consequently save his people)

This is not a foreign concept to believers that have been walking with God for some time. Many still wait and look for deliverance and fulfillment of promise in the midst of impossible reality.

It feels like crossing a swamp, where each step requires lifting a foot out of a mire of suction-mud through stinking waist-deep water. It takes time. Agonizing time.

I’ve seen it as a series of false peaks in the mountaineering task of believing despite treacherous slopes, many falls, and thin air. One thinks one sees the peak just up ahead, only to realize to our dismay, after cresting it, that there is another far away. Even worse is how repetitiously this seems to occur, and how many years of our lives this energy sapping ascent requires, without any visible sign of reward.

It doesn’t start as a slog though. The birth of hope from a promise from God pulls our hearts forward into the very storm that seems to deny the possibility of its fulfillment. If the believer is faithful, they will continue regardless, strengthening themselves with the promise given, and affirmations that God is both good and faithful.

And the years tick by, one struggles seemingly endlessly against all the difficulties that seem to keep appearing, until one’s whole world is swallowed by it. There is now only swamp, and only mountain. The muck keeps getting stickier as the water rises. The slope keeps getting more steep, sharp rocks abundant as storm after storm arrives. The shine of promise fades, and seems an outcome at best equal in positive potential to the accumulation of negative years suffered for it.

And now the believer, as things currently stand, has no emotional answer to the devil’s question of whether it is truly worth continuing through mire and rock. The pain is equal in weight to the joy of anticipated fulfilled promise.

It is a trick he plays to keep one from understanding a mechanism that has been in motion ever since one began believing in hope.

That hope transitions from one form to another.

One did not notice, in all one’s travail, the newly formed muscle lining one’s legs. The back that has widened and can now bear burdens previously not surmisable. It’s the newfound lung capacity that heaves oxygen into the bloodstream, that energizes the body like a power line.

Spiritual mires and mountains have no mirrors or photographs- nothing to see one’s current self in, and no picture to compare to what we were before. We travel ignorant of ourselves, and do not see that we’ve become giants with leaping stride in swamps or catapulting ourselves up mountain shelves with herculean might – even if we do so sadly in a depressive gait.

If we saw ourselves, we would experience in ourselves the transformation of hope from a future oriented promise that pulls us forward, to hope and encouragement from what we have become and the distance we have travelled. Hope of future fulfilled promise transforms into currently embodied hope, as people (and hopefully oneself) rejoices in the vitality they have developed that they were previously blind to, and before that, did not possess at all! We are, in this process, ourselves objects of hope to onlookers (even to us if we are the onlooker of ourselves)

Maybe it requires admission of how much smaller we were before all the hell materialized around us so we can properly see ourselves in the now.

It makes one wonder what God cared about more: promised outcome, or the evolution of giants – and which we ought also prioritize.

… and we know what happened with Abraham, David, and Joseph. They all became giants – giants living fulfilled promises. Giant hands are needed to hold giant promises that would otherwise topple us through their sheer weight when actualized: like nation-birthing, nation-saving, and king-becoming.