What can you do when your place of greatest hope begins to infringe on your deepest disappointment? What is one to do when cold, hard retreat and impending satisfaction neither seem viable options?
Can one who is lame ever dare to truly walk on his own, when any attempts made previously ended in the same pitiful falling? And by the same token, can one bear to deny any future hope for a successful, stabilized attempt?
Such is the bittersweet flower we call "hope." It is at once a sweet fragrance and a putrid odor, depending on which side of a moment it stands.
Hope...deferred makes the heart sick. But a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
Some shoots may grow into beautiful trees, even out of what was once a stump perhaps. But how many times can such a stump bear to extend a fresh, green shoot, groping towards heaven, before it becomes weary of the constant chopping down which it is never quite, and somehow always, accustomed to?
As my mom, Cat Ello, wrote in one of her songs years ago,
"Jesus, Gardner of my heart,
break this fallow ground apart."
Oh to be tree....tree indeed.
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