Kayla Smith

It was a precious question from a curious boy that caught me totally off guard on a sunny afternoon.

“Like, children?”
“Yeah, where are they?”
“Well, I don’t have any yet…”

This sweet moment of curiosity that led to this miniBFF affirming that he would, in fact, be friends with my sons when I have them, but he would also be older than them so we would have to establish that once they could understand, but not when they were babies because babies can’t understand…(this is a runon sentence isn’t it…)

This moment led to a deeper moment about hope.

His mom and I got to talk with him about how I want to marry someone that loves God and wants to do what God says is right. That I want to marry someone who is kind to me and encourages me. And that if he knows of anyone, hook ya gurl up.

He also noted that I probably couldn’t marry his dad. Which is correct. That would be weird.

As he went back to chilling in the sunny April afternoon, his mom and I went in on hope.

How terrible and necessary and terribly necessary it is.
How we can’t live without it, but living with it means opening yourself up to the possibility of earth shattering heartbreak.

Yet.

The hope we have does not put us to shame.
The hope that we have can never be taken away.
The hope that we have is kept in heaven, unfading and undefiled for us.

As someone who walked close by as the thing I hoped for escaped me, she knows how tricky my relationship with hope is.

I don’t like that is necessary.
But I know it’s the only thing I have.
Hope that God is a God of redemption and restoration and resurrection.
Hope that all things will be made new.
Hope that someday I will have a husband and children, so that my miniBFF can have some younger friends to remind how old he is.

On a recent episode of Coffee with Kailey, Annie F. Downs says this about hope: “I’d rather die full of hope and the Lord and I have to look each other in the eyes and be like, ‘Who’s holding this one?’ I would rather be full of hope until the end – which you have to fight for and you have to choose – than to go, ‘You know what, forget it I’m not going to want anymore. Because when you stop wanting food is when you lose nutrition and nutrients and your body wastes away. When we stop our desires, we actually don’t get healthy, we get emaciated. And I can’t do that to my hope. So we’re going to keep feeding hope.”

And that’s it.

I don’t always want to hope. Because it hurts. Anyone who has actually hoped for something and not gotten it will tell you it capital H hurts.

But pretending that I don’t have hope.
Putting my desires in a box that I never intend to open while they gather dust and waste away.

That will kill me.

As Annie said, I’d rather die full of hope and deal with it for all of eternity in the presence of my redemptive Savior than spend my life wasting away.