Remember Hope

Reflections of a hopeful Mom

“ O Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.” Psalm 130:7 NIV

Remember Hope. The phrase came to my mind one day this fall, soon after we learned we were expecting a new baby … a baby girl who shares a due date with her older sister Hope, our firstborn angel in Heaven.

I didn’t know what it meant at the time, and I have spent much of my “free time” mulling it over since then. (Free time does not come along very often with a 4 and 2 year old at home.) Was I supposed to focus on remembering the life of my firstborn, Hope, in some special way? Was I to hang on to hope for this new baby’s life? What did God mean when he put that phrase on my heart?

Well, recently I finally decided to sit down and write out all the Bible verses I could find on ‘hope’ in hopes that I would hear Him better. In my search, the verse above tugged at my heart. Unfailing love and full redemption? Who doesn’t want that? It was because of that unfailing love that God sent Jesus, as a baby born over 2,000 years ago to live the perfect life we never could. To die the death we deserved to die. And to give us hope for the perfection we were truly made for. We long for perfection because we were made for it, created in it. But that was taken away when sin entered the world.

We all suffer the effects of sin on our broken world in some capacity. For us in recent years, it has looked like multiple losses and difficulty in planning and having a family. But the Psalmist goes on to say that with the Lord is “full redemption.” One day, all will be made well. All the tears wiped away. Our happily ever after will come.

Today, I am praying for full redemption on this earth for my baby girl. For God to heal her mouth and lip, (she has been diagnosed with cleft lip and palate, see my first post for more details) and for Him to fully redeem that due date she shares with Hope. But even if He doesn’t choose to heal her, I will cling to the higher hope that one day, all will be made perfect, whole, and complete… In Jesus, our hope of glory.

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“See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are!… Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as really he is.” 1 John 3:1–2 NLT

“This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary.” Hebrews 6:19 NLT