Painted rocks are a thing here where I live. It's not unusual to find one on a hike through the desert or walking around downtown even. Some of them have images, some have words. There's a whole Facebook page dedicated to finding these rocks, posting a photo of them, and then leaving them in a new place for someone else to find.
When our house flooded back in 2022, we found a painted rock in our backyard. It was strange, because we had lived here close to five years by that point, and I had never seen it before. Maybe it got knocked over by the flood waters, I don't know. It said: "Jesus left the 99 for you." It was like a message from above, letting me know God was with me, even in the tragic circumstances we found ourselves in. I left the rock where I found it, underneath our tree with the purple flowers.
Stranger yet... I've never seen it again. If I didn't have a photo of it, I would think I had imagined it.
That small moment helped me keep going through a difficult time.
It was a moment that gave me hope.
Something I find myself saying quite often, is that I wouldn’t do the work I do if I didn’t have hope. Hope in change. Hope in healing. Hope in love. Hope that a different world is possible.
Yet sometimes, in the middle of a struggle, hope is hard to hold onto. When you look at the size of the problem you are confronted with or focus on all the forces at work against you, things may in fact seem quite... hopeless.
How do we hold onto hope in desperate times? Because if we lose hope… That’s the end of it then, isn’t it?
If I didn’t have hope, I couldn’t keep doing the work that I do. I couldn’t keep fighting the fights I fight or running the races I run or helping the people I help. What would be the point?
So, what do you do? What do you do when the night is dark and it seems as though the morning will never come?
One of my professors has committed her career to ending gendercide (aka violence against women). She even wrote a book about it, called "The Cross and Gendercide". Today in class she said, "We keep on doing the work, because it is not our work. It is Christ's work. And His words, His work, will never come back void, even if you don't see it."
I found those words incredibly profound. Especially as in her class we are studying changemakers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bryan Stevenson. We are studying people who refused to give up even when faced with insurmountable odds. Even when it led to criticism or banishment or excommunication. Or even death.
The work is not ours. The work is God's, and He calls us all to do our part. Whether our part is fighting racial injustice or poverty or child abuse or humane border policies or gendercide - we all must do our part. We may not be able to see the difference or the impact that our work makes, but, if we trust in Him, we can trust that it is not done in vain. Look for the moments of hope - the glimmers, I've heard them called. The little moments that help you to continue on.
If injustice still exists in any form in our world, then our work is not yet done.
Yes, God will redeem this world and everything in it and bring about His kingdom come one day. Until that day, the people of God are called to His holy purposes and we must continue in the fight!
And we must have hope. Hope that every little ripple makes a difference. That every voice makes a difference.
Don’t give up.
No matter what happens tomorrow, no matter what happens in our country, no matter what happens in the world, God still sits on His throne.
And we must still continue onward, doing His work.
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