More Room For Your Hope

We talked about freeing our hearts up a little to make more room for the hope that God wants to give us.  I like the analogy that our hearts are like gardens, where living things thrive:
     
     Isaiah 58:11 ..."and thou shalt be like a watered garden..."    KJV

     Isaiah 61:3 ..."the planting of the LORD..."    KJV

The Lord wants to plant where He knows He will get a return on His investment, on His deposits of divine hope; the return He wants is our attention, our hearts.

 Your ideal garden may not look like mine - your heart doesn't look like mine.  The "planting of the Lord" above in Isaiah 61 is specifically talking about how God can make a hopeless life become like an awe-inspiring forest of strong, towering trees that stir anyone who visits that forest to glorify God.  Now that's a garden!  Your heart in this analogy may look like a meticulously pruned topiary garden or a vista of busy daisies in a wild field, bobbing their heads in the afternoon breeze.  Your heart may joy in the rolling view of islands of Queen Anne's lace and bachelor's buttons clinging to the heels of the Blue Ridge; what about standing in one of God's lichen covered rock gardens high atop Cloud Peak?

Don't try to plant your hopes in someone else's garden.  After nine years of working in a ministry under some really talented and anointed people, I was told by one of the leaders, "You have lost your vision."  I translated that as, I have lost my hope!  These were very strong and charismatic personalities whose "gardens" had overtaken my own and I had allowed it, like kudzu (if you're from the South you know what I'm talking about) covering an entire hillside, becoming a dense canopy over everything that was originally visible.

I had to find the hopes that the Lord had spent years cultivating into my heart as I made room through exchanging my stuff for His. God has specific hopes to plant in each one of us.  I had to allow Him to help me regain the vision of my God-given original hopes - He helps us get down to the bedrock foundation in cases like this. 

A young man told my husband, Terry, and I about how he had lost everything and almost had a breakdown; he was really suffering financially, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually.  He blasted out question after question to God:  "Why, God, why?"
...until he was on the ground and he realized he still had his foundation.  He still had hope of something to build upon or to re-build upon.  He had/has the living foundation of the hope that God will bring him to a place of stability and contentment.

That young man realized that he couldn't rebuild on a foundation using the plumb line of self!

Wow, that conversation was a spark of hope!

Make Room for Hope

My heart started out like yours.......
     an unconquered wilderness.

It was intended to be a Spirit house - to be like Eden, "the planting of the Lord," a "well watered garden" full of delights, orderly, colorfully and logically planned, planted without chaotic over growths of weeds and intruding vines.
 Our hearts have such capacity to become holding tanks of beauty that can exude and pour out over our world to transform the hopelessness into something positive and rock-solid to hold on to. All we have to do is decide whether or not we'll allow it. 

It is time for hope!  

It is time to clean out the heart tank - exchange what's in there for what can be in there.
Exchange is such an exercise of freedom. The more we are willing to exercise exchanging "our stuff" for "God's stuff" the more our heart's capacity will enlarge for things that we could never imagine. 

1 Corinthians 2:9 "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him." (KJV)

I'd like to quote Michael Card's "The Things We Leave Behind"
    "People left things behind after they encountered Jesus; the woman at the well left her      water jars, the son of the widow of Nain left his coffin, Simon and the other fishermen left their boats and nets; 
I wonder what I have left behind for His sake?
With each thing left behind, we leave a small piece of ourselves, because a possession 
isn't a little something you own, as much as something that owns a little bit of you.
We leave behind a part of our old self, our old man. (our old habits, old ways of reacting, old
beliefs that we mold the rest of ourselves around....slipping back into our old same-old-
same-old...  my thoughts) 

     In return for whatever small thing we discard Jesus gives us a part of Himself in 
     exchange.

    With Him is great freedom from those things we leave behind, freedom from that greatest
    self-possessing possession, our "self."

Why am I holding onto sooooo much? 

Fear of losing out.

You know, children trust with such abandonment because they have no concept of losing out. They open their little hands and hearts. Their little hearts, I believe, are so much bigger than ours as adults! If we could really see their hearts the way Father God does, it would look like they had an ocean of trust inside of them. How could that be possible?

Thomas Williams composed the hymn, "O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus." It's rolling lyrics say of His love:
     .....vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!
    Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me...

Now that is the kind of bountiful heart-filling, heart-healing, heart-freeing exchange that can wash out hopelessness and flood instead with resolve toward a positive outlook.