Daring to Hope and Pray

Last week I was blessed to hear a podcast that was very timely for me. I'm a fan of Christie Purifoy through her lovely memoir Roots and Sky and her beauty-filled Instagram account, and she recently started a podcast called Out of the Ordinary with her friend and fellow author Lisa-Jo Baker. I'd been receiving notification emails for the weekly podcast installments, but I hadn't found the time to listen to them yet. Then last week's episode topic caught my eye, because the title was "Why Hope Scares Us Silly!"

I named this blog "Hopeful Patience" because hope and patience are two things that I really wrestle with. I often struggle with the relationship between hope and prayer. When I think about praying for things that I hope for, I get nervous, and I feel like I might be able to protect myself from disappointment if I don't pray about what I hope for. I can get lured by the poisonous thinking that I shouldn't ask God for things, that my requests don't really matter to Him. This is especially true when He asks me to wait for a long, long time for something that means a lot to me. My big example of this is waiting to have children. My husband and I have been trying for over 9 years, which, when I think about it, seems like an unfathomable amount of time to wait for something.

In the podcast, Christie spoke about her experience struggling to get pregnant while her three closest friends successively announced their pregnancies. That story really spoke to me, because not having a child truly is most acutely painful when I learn that someone else around me has become pregnant. Christie also said something really profound: she said that she believes God allowed her to experience the suffering of comparing her situation to others' so that her desire for a child would stay at the forefront of her mind, so she would feel as blessed and grateful as possible when she finally was given her son. 

This idea impacted me. It made me think, maybe God is keeping this desire strong within me because He wants me to hope for it, and because He wants me to keep praying and asking Him for it. Maybe He isn't looking for me to just do my best to let it go until the right time comes; maybe He is pleased when I nurture this desire and call upon Him to fulfill it.

I liked how Christie and Lisa-Jo emphasized that hoping feels dangerous, and that it requires courage. It's helpful to see hope as something I must fight to hold onto, something that, like any virtue, requires me to pursue it mightily. Putting it in that context helps me to expect and prepare for moments when hoping will seem like it doesn't make sense.

So I am resolving to pray more often about my desire for a child, trusting that God has placed this desire in my heart and that it is His will for me to bring it before Him in prayer. I don't need to know what His response will be; I just need to converse with Him, my loving Father.