Hope Deferred

Somewhere around the second year, we stopped praying it out loud, and we called that being realistic. The prayer got shorter, and then it got vague. Now it is a sentence we can say without our voice changing at all.

Proverbs has another word for that state. It calls it sickness: "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick." The Hebrew word behind "sick" is the ordinary word for being ill or weak, the word used of a body that has run down. Deferred means drawn out. A deferred hope has been put off and stretched out, and it is still open. The book sets this beside its other plain notes on how bodies and money and households work, and it puts no blame on the heart that got sick from waiting.

So bring the thing itself to God, in the words you used before you trimmed them down. Lord, it has been this long. You know the request, and You know how tired we are of making it. We have become skilled at wanting it less. Your proverb says the other half is "a tree of life." That picture reaches back to the garden at the beginning, and forward to the last chapter of the Bible, where the tree of life stands in the city with leaves "for the healing of the nations." Do it, Lord, if You will. And if the answer is a longer wait, keep us from calling our sickness a sin.

Look at how carefully the proverb is worded. It describes what a hope put off does to a person, and what a hope fulfilled does, and it leaves the timing with God. What it gives you this morning is an honest name for the state you are in, and that name is not sin. It also points you to a God whose last word, at the end of the Bible, is a tree of life with healing in its leaves.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 268 is The Father of Comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two