Hope Floats

My daughter Hope is beautiful.

Her dark almond eyes, creamy flawless skin and shimmering black hair are gifts of her Thai heritage.

And Hope is smart.

Her little mind spins at warp speed, assimilating new information and firing off questions about the world that, many times, this mama can’t answer. Her giggles are contagious, fed by a precocious sense of humor. 

Hope has all of this… but she has no arms or legs.

She was born to a poor family in the northern mountains of Thailand who felt that they couldn’t give her the life  she deserved. After spending the first seven years of her life in a Bangkok orphanage, she joined our family in 2012 as our twelfth child.

She and we don’t fall into despair about her lot in life. We don’t despair because of One thing we have discovered.

Hope floats.

She actually, to our surprise, flung herself into our swimming pool that first summer she was with us. We watched her  plummet to the bottom only to quickly bob to the surface, where she floated tranquilly on her back with a big grin on her face.

I’ve come to realize that Hope’s buoyancy is a metaphor for her life and ours in Christ.

We all are missing limbs.  Maybe not physically, but emotionally and spiritually for sure.  Ever since the beginning when we decided we had a better plan to do life than the one our Creator gave us, we all limp through our days with insecurities, pride, selfishness, and anxieties. We’re hobbled by injustice and cruelty and idolatry.  Some of us put on the prosthetics of worldly success and achievement, while leaning on our crutches of comfort and hedonism.  But none of these aides will change our spiritual anatomy.

But there is a Restorer who will.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ…” (2 Cor. 5:17-19)

And we don’t despair.

“Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:16-18)

“So let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful.” (Heb. 10:23)

And so because He is restoring us…

and He is faithful…

hope floats.