Hope for Your Future

No one wants someone to capture a picture of them and cage them forever to a still moment in time. Yet, if I’m honest, I’ve been the photographer more often than I care to admit, revisiting the dark room of someone’s past. This file cabinet seems benign, safe even. Because I’m aware of something you’re capable of. Here’s the proof, after all.

I remember the day I sat in a puddle of pain, replaying how I hurt him. I didn’t see it at first because all I could see was the pain I thought he’d inflict on me. But God, in His kindness, revealed the malignant decay that had grown from a speck to a crater in my own heart. A video entitled Breaking Judgments to Repair Relationships appeared as a divine assignment across my screen, showing me where I needed to repent. Interestingly enough, God recently showed it to me again.

Over the past week, God has been faithful and complete in His work. He’s never interested in lip service, outward appearance, or feigned desire. He wants a changed heart and mind in His people. Transformation that works itself out in action.

In sincerity, I could say that I wanted good for the people in my life. I wanted them to prosper, not to be harmed, to have the hope of Christ, and the future He wanted for them. I’d pray to that end. But I was always one conversation away from threatening the belief I held for something better for them. It was my thoughts. It was my words. It was my actions that painted a dual reality of a double mind.

In some respects, that’s the challenge of living in this fallen world. That’s the reality of knowing the truth but being face to face with a fact that pronounces the truth a lie. After emerging from an unhealthy church culture, I’ve since learned that God doesn’t want us to deny facts as delusions of faith. Yet I do believe He wants us to break the judgments about people we deem unholy because of their still (and sometimes still present) acts. And I think that’s the key. It’s not just that their acts are unholy; we have judged them to be. We have assigned them unmovable Scarlett letter labels.

Practically, I’ve learned and am relearning the importance of keeping a gate over my heart, mind, and lips. I must filter out speech that is salt water when God called my mouth to produce fresh (James 3:1-12). I cannot in one breath, pray for God’s deliverance and transformation of others, and in the next, spew out all the evidence of how my prayer is nowhere in sight. Yet it’s not enough to just not say it; I have to see people differently too, and that is a work that starts in my heart. That is a work that can only be begun on bended knees, begging God to change and humble me.

While vacuuming the floor the other day, my sister texted me and said she wished something could be true about a guy she’d been involved with. It was like a lightbulb went off from all the messages God had sent me the past few days, and I knew that this would be the next thing I wrote about. I texted her back and said that I've been impressed to begin seeing, thinking about, speaking about, treating, and responding to people as God sees them… as I desire to see them one day.

I can’t undo my past as much as they can’t undo theirs. Without God, neither one of us can do anything new with our presents either. But I’m reigniting my belief in what I know God can do. Not void of facing facts and maintaining boundaries so, like Lysa TerKeurst said, we can preserve the good in us and the relationships we long to have with others. But with a changed posture and vision of people. To think, feel, speak, and act like I really have hope for their future.