AUGUST 8

New Hope

1 Peter 1:3-4

FLOUNDERING WITH MY FATHER IS among my most cherished childhood memories.

Armed with a beat-up Coleman lantern, two gigs, a stringer, and clothed in old sneakers, faded jeans, torn T-shirts, and funny hats, we’d wade into the shallow water. When the sky got nice and dark, we’d start in. Not too far out, you understand, knee-deep was plenty. And off we’d stumble into the night to stab a few flat, brown creatures who chose our shoreline as the place for a shrimp supper.

To this day, I still remember looking back wistfully over my shoulder toward that ever-so-tiny light at our cabin in the distance. Soon I began asking myself why. Why in the world had I agreed to come? If I asked him once, I must have asked a dozen times, “How much longer, Daddy? When are we gonna turn around?” In tones that were mellow and quiet, he comforted me. I asked, “What if the mantle burns out?” I brought along a flashlight. “What if the batteries are dead?” He assured me that he was very familiar with the path that would get us back. While he was searching for flounder, I was looking and listening for relief . . . those marvelous words, “Well, Son, this is far enough. Let’s turn around.”

Instantly, I found myself wading on tiptoes, caring nothing about finding some poor flounder —only that light, that tiny signal in the distance that assured me my dad really knew the way. Suddenly, my anxieties were relieved. My questions were answered. Hope lit the darkness like a thousand lanterns thanks to one tiny light at the end of my childhood tunnel of fears. That’s the power of hope.

We live with great expectation, and we have a priceless inheritance —an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.

1 PETER 1:3-4

Perhaps you’re wading through your own muddy circumstances, bewildered by God’s mysterious plan. Maybe you’re asking, “How much longer? Will this cold, dark winter ever end? Does He know where I am?”

Someday, your heavenly Father will say, “That’s far enough,” and how sweet it will be!