How Choosing Hope Pleases God Now—and Echoes in Eternity

Posted on Sep 26, 2023 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Sally Clarkson

As young, hopeful, and idealistic parents of four, my husband and I had big dreams— dreams of changing the world, of making a difference, of leaving our mark...our wallet, however, didn’t always concur.

We always knew we wanted to dedicate our lives to ministry and to help bring others to Christ, but life so often seemed to conspire against those dreams we believed God had placed on our hearts. Never more so than when, with three kids under 12 and another on the way, we were squeezed out of a church we had helped grow by pouring so much of ourselves into it. We were out of money and options and had to move in with my husband’s mother, all the way out in a tiny sort of ghost town called Walnut Springs, Texas, where we would more likely encounter snakes than people.

When we initially said “I do” a little over a decade earlier and cast our vision for the future with our young, optimistic hearts, this was not what we had in mind. Things were not lining up with the long-held hopes and desires we had lengthy, late-night conversations and long-winded prayers about for years. By our timeline, we should have been leading a large, robust ministry, impacting people’s lives across the globe, and bringing them closer to their creator. Instead, we were in the middle of nowhere, with messy children, living with my mother-in-law!

I began to feel deep despair, wondering if God had forgotten about us or if we had gotten our dreams wrong. It was then that we realized we had a significant choice to make. We could allow hopelessness to fester in our hearts, or we could make the choice to trust God even in the middle of this literal desert.

Day after day, I put on a brave smile for the kids, trying my hardest to give them the best childhood I could. After putting them to bed each night, I would sit on the back deck, breathe in a few moments of peace, and gaze into the magnificent Texas sky. It was there, in the quiet and stillness of twilight, I would ask God if He remembered me, if I mattered, and if any of my hard work and the deep desires that continued to live in my heart meant anything at all.

Each day, even when I did not feel like it, I made the choice to get out of bed, thank God for small blessings, and offer up my hope for the future into His loving hands. I decided to be faithful with where I was and with what I had, even though most of it did not align with the life we had envisioned.

And so, with every new day, I would craft tasty meals, educate the children, provide them with adventures, and read books to them; at night, after talking to God for a while, I would write the words of what would eventually become my first book.

My husband, in lockstep with me, bought a desk and placed it in an abandoned old house on the property and began the long, tedious, unending work of conceptualizing and putting together a ministry, with no guarantee of success.

Looking back, now more than 30 years down the line, I wish I could tell my younger self just how important, formative, and significant those days were. How every sigh and prayer did matter, how every decision to smile for my children and work on my book, even when I had no assurance that anyone would ever read it, would lead to the life I have been blessed enough to live today—one of many books and a ministry that takes us around the world.

I could not see it then, but the difficult choices I made—even while in the dark, to walk in the direction of the Lord and what I felt He had put on my heart through the steady and often unseen acts of faithfulness—all mattered. Not only will these choices matter in this life, but they will also echo into eternity, affecting my children’s lives and so many others down the line.

We cannot see God face-to-face in this lifetime. But when we live our lives in the truth of His reality, it not only pleases Him, but it also shows the world the reality of Him through the ways we live. When we exercise our faith and choose to be faithful at every age, it pleases Him for us to believe in His reality and presence.