The Hope You Keep Under Your Breath

She has three sentences ready and she can produce any of them without thinking.

We will see. One thing at a time. I am not getting my hopes up. They are good sentences. They are warm enough that nobody is offended, vague enough that nobody follows up, and true enough that she is not lying when she says them. She has used them at work, at her sister's kitchen table, and once, memorably, to a woman in a waiting room who was only being kind.

Underneath the three sentences there is one thing she wants. She could say it in nine words. She has not said those nine words out loud to another human being in four years.

Because the last time, she did. She told two people. She let herself picture it properly, in detail, which is the part she still cannot think about without her jaw setting: she pictured the phone call, and where she would be standing when it came, and who she would ring first, and what she would say to them. She got as far as imagining the drive.

And it did not come.

The not coming was one thing. People survive that. What she has never been able to explain to anybody is that it was worse for having been said. The saying had built something, and the something had a shape, and when it went there was a shaped hole where it had been, and everybody could see her standing in it, and there were kind people who knew, which meant there was no version of it she got to have privately.

So she made a decision. Not a dramatic one. She has never announced it and would not use the words, but the decision is real and she has kept it flawlessly for four years: she does not say it out loud, she does not picture it, and she does not name it in a full sentence, not even alone, not even to God. She gestures at it in prayer. She does not name it. Naming is what did the damage.

And she is not bitter, and she is not faithless, and she would be genuinely offended if anybody suggested either. She still hopes. That is exactly the trouble. The hope did not go anywhere; it just went under her breath, where it is quieter and where it cannot build anything that has a shape to lose.

You know this. Perhaps yours is nine words and perhaps it is three. Perhaps it is a name, or a room in your house, or a place you have never told anybody you would like to go back to, or a phone that would have to ring. Whatever it is, you have a prepared sentence for when somebody asks, and the true sentence has not been out of your mouth in a very long time, and you have never once called that cowardice, because it is not.

Let us be careful with this. It deserves care.

Scripture says it before you do

The first thing to establish is that God is not squeamish about this, because He wrote the sentence about it long before you got here.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.Proverbs 13:12

Maketh the heart sick. Not maketh the heart faithless. Not exposes a shortage in the believer. Sick, which is a word for an injury rather than a word for a fault, and it is sitting in the middle of the wisdom literature where anybody can find it.

That verse is the reason I can talk to you honestly this morning. Somebody was allowed to write down, in the book, that waiting for a good thing that keeps not arriving does something to a person's insides. It is not a modern weakness. It is not a failure of the sort of faith other people apparently have. It is a documented human injury and it has been on the record for three thousand years.

You are not being examined here, and God has never once treated your caution as a charge against you. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is not in you to audit the guard you put up after the last time, but to be the Comforter, which is the name Jesus chose Himself.

So let us call the four years what they actually are. That is not unbelief. That is a burn healing the way burns heal, with tighter skin over the place, so that the same heat cannot get in the same way twice.

And nobody has ever told you that. It has been carried as a secret defect for four years, on top of the thing itself.

Two things wearing the same word

Now something that matters, and I want to lay it out slowly, because it is the difference between comfort and the truth, and only one of them holds.

There are two different things going about under the word hope, and they have been collapsed into one, and that is where the damage compounds.

The first is the particular outcome. The nine words. The phone call, the room, the name. That one is real, it is allowed, God is not embarrassed by it, and He may give it and He may not, and nothing on this page is going to tell you which. I am not going to promise you the thing. Anybody who promises you the thing is spending your last four years of scar tissue to make a sentence sound better, and I will not do it.

The second is hope as Scripture uses the word, which is not a forecast at all. It is a Person and what has been settled about you in Him, and that one does not run on odds.

You have a hope that was never staked on the outcome, and it has been holding through every one of those four years whether or not it was felt. Romans 5:5 says hope maketh not ashamed, and it gives the reason in the same breath, that the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, so the guarantee is His love arriving rather than the circumstance arriving.

Read that verse carefully, because it is easy to misuse. It does not say the outcome always comes. It says the hope does not put you to shame, and the reason given is a Person poured out inside you rather than a probability outside you. Those are not the same promise and only one of them was ever made.

Then Jeremiah, in Lamentations, in the middle of the worst thing he ever wrote, does something worth copying. He says: this I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. He does not summon a feeling. He goes and gets a fact he already had, and he puts it back in front of himself on purpose, and the mercies are new every morning is what he finds when he does it.

You were given something to recall that does not depend on how the last four years went. Lamentations 3:22 says His compassions fail not, and the written word puts them on a morning by morning basis, and the Spirit is the one who brings a fact like that to mind at the exact hour when the mind is doing something else.