Hope…

We have this certain hope like a strong, unbreakable anchor holding our souls to God himself. Our anchor of hope is fastened to the mercy seat in the heavenly realm beyond the sacred threshold.

Hebrews 6:19 TPT.

I’ve been in a place of wallowing lately, like a dried-up old stream, a hopeless shell I became. Everything stopped. And I found myself ever dwelling on the trapping circumstances of my life. Never had I felt darker. More hopeless. So close to death. I felt an existential crisis once again rising in me. Why am I here? What’s the point? Is this all there is?

Yet I also felt a binding sense of shame. There has been so much hardship in the world these past few years – so how can I complain? And yet if I do not face these darker parts of my life how can I ever move forward?

So many questions in 2021 and what seemed like no answers.

I am going to be thirty years old in November this year and too often I have felt like my life has amounted to nothing yet. I don’t mean ambition or success, but days not cut short with constant grief.

I’ve been grieving for too long the life that I could not have. Grieving for how different my days might have been. I don’t mention it much anymore, but I need to now. The diagnosis of Huntington’s disease at nineteen years old irrevocably changed my life. Perhaps I’m only admitting that now, but it did. I felt like my young life had been cut short. Maybe I didn’t speak about it before because I didn’t want to be a victim or be ungrateful. I have been blessed with a beautiful life. But this diagnosis has stolen from me many years that otherwise would have been very different. I cannot change that.

I have lived in voiceless grief these past ten years.

By the grace of God and the love of family I still managed to get back up again and walk on with life -into a very changed life. By the grace of God I was able to go back into education and get a degree. By the grace of God I started to work on my health. But the waves of grief have always returned and often I feel like I am fighting for my very life.

Only last week I had perhaps one of the deepest, darkest moments yet in my grief. I am going to be thirty in November and my diagnosis was thirty-nine years old. The realisation started to set in – what if I only have nine years left of normality? Why would I ever be excited about reaching my thirties with this prospect ahead? What chance have I got of ever doing anything with my life with only that time left? And I have wasted so much already on grieving.

Somehow, I thought the grieving would go away. But it never did.

I have been so hard on myself before – why can’t you just get on with life? Just make the most of it. But the grief is like a wave and it hits out of nowhere.

I am constantly grieving another life I would have had.

I’m carrying a burden I didn’t want.

This grief has been even more perpetuated over the past few years when it began to become clear that we may never have any children. My whole future felt blighted. Not only is my life cut short, but a life cut short without any descendants. No line to carry the hope of a future.

With every passing day, I am flung ever closer to the diagnosis and ever further away from the possibility of having children. And that is why I feel trapped in my circumstances.

And now to become thirty is to become stuck right in the middle of it all.

And yet one word has been dropped in my heart in the days before Christmas…

HOPE…

My circumstances have not changed yet. I’m still not pregnant. I still have that diagnosis set before me.

But God has set a seed of a word in my heart, and I am writing in hopes that it will stir it up within me. These circumstances are beyond impossible, but my God would not have given me such a word as ‘Hope’ to taunt or mock me. He is the One true God.

I don’t know what ‘Hope’ holds for me yet, but I know God is good and He is in the hope-filled business of miracles and healing.

This is what ‘Hope’ looks like – having impossible circumstances, being hemmed in all around and yet still believing that something good will come.