When all you have is the hope of hope...

What do you do with doubt?

When lies whisper louder than fact. When the doubts don't just blink the lights, they uproot trees and twist and strangle death to the roots. When they grasp like a whirlwind, loose, tight enough to sense, but not feel. When you're squeezed like a vice, you know. This is worse, this whirlwind, feather light, so unyielding and unending, twirling you right dizzy until everything you thought you knew is upside down and you can't even see the rest. 

What do you do with honesty?

When your five year old cries, loud and angry from the backseat of the car - "I wish he hadn't left. He is making my life so hard!" When her sobs turn to regrets. "Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I should leave." 

What do you do with a broken heart that insists on staying in mosaic mode?

What do you do when you've picked up the pieces so many times, they just slip right through your fingers, and break again on the way down?

What do you do when your strength fades weak and you wonder if the battle is even worth fighting anymore? If there's any hope, any truth, any goodness left in the lie you lived for a decade?

How do you fix someone else's heart when your own is still up for grabs?

You say what I said to that five year old in the back seat. "It's going to be ok. Know how I know?"

"How?"

"Because God knows."

The silence that followed could have tucked me in that night.  

"He sees the future. He knows what happened, knows what will happen...and we can trust Him because He is good."

More silence, warmer now, like a quilt out of the dryer. Peace soaking into the deep places. Not joy. Not hope. Not yet. 

But there's the hope of hope. 

"God knows you and I didn't want this. He has a plan for us, baby. He knows what we do want."

Sniff.

"And so we just keep telling Him those things and waiting on Him for good."

It's a hard lesson for a five year old to embrace. But she took it and held tight, and her mama did maybe even tighter, words binding together wounds that didn't really come from her own mouth, but somewhere deep within, somewhere close to the residing place of the Holy Spirit. Words not from her own capability, but from Someone else's. Someone good. 

Because what can you do with doubt and honesty and brokenness? 

Nothing. Nothing worth anything. 

Unless you give it over to the one who specializes in Mosaic tiles. Who formed the universe from words, and man from dust, and has no trouble figuring out how to bring beauty from broken. 

The whirlwind whirls, the trees dip and sway, and the doubts still roar and howl. Still makes you wonder, every time, what is true, what is real, what is worth holding onto and is it even worth holding on at all. 

But the truth at the end of the day, that outlives the wind and the fear and the storm, remains the same. 

He is good. 

So we don't have to know what to do. Because He does.