There is a song in the Disney movie Frozen 2 called “The Next Right Thing.”  For me, it is one of the most moving Disney songs that has come along in a long while.  The character Anna believes that her sister Elsa is dead, her snowman friend Olaf has also ceased to exist, and she is sitting in a dark cave all alone.  The actress who voices the character, Kristen Bell, beautifully brings it to life with so much feeling, and there is an understanding of grief, hopelessness, and endurance in the lyrics.  When I listen to it I hear the echo of my own dark nights, and I believe this song resonates with many others in the same way.

Life is, as my father always says, at its BEST, challenging and fraught with difficulty.  My own life has felt as if I have had an uncommonly large helping of challenge and difficulty, and life challenges along with difficult seasons have been the norm for me.  My sister and I even joke that chaos and difficulty feel more normal to us than anything else.  That is not to say that we have been without wonderfully beautiful moments of joy and delight, but on the whole, struggle and seemingly insurmountable odds have been our constant companion.

In these last twenty-some years of my life, I have found that in order to continue on, hope has to turn from being a sense of expectation and determination, to that of endurance.  Hope that is delicate, easily discouraged, chipped away at, or a wish, will not stay with you long in seasons of challenge and struggle.  I find it inspiring that God said, “these three abide, faith, hope and love.”  These are the three ingredients to life.  Faith needs hope, faith needs love.  Faith is the consistent belief that what God said is true and will remain so for all time.  Faith believes that God truly is who He is, and that He will do what He says. Period. I believe that hope is what makes our faith personal.  Yet hope is funny.  We tend to think that hope is what we “wish” to happen, or some interpretation of our own thought of what God promises.  I can tell you from experience, that is a fragile hope.  God Himself said that we cannot understand the vastness of His promises toward us, and they are beyond the greatest things that we can hope for or expect.  Beyond.  And when we hope too small, as we inevitably do, or hope too narrowly, God, in His faithfulness, allows us to be disappointed in that hope.

I have come to this point of disappointment many many times.  I am a problem solver.  I am someone who can reason intellectually about many things.  I have thought that I understood what God was promising me, only to watch that expectation be dashed.  In those moments it has felt like an arrow to my heart, and the grief that I have felt has been so heavy and suffocating at times.  My cry was, “Why God? I thought...,” and there it is - I thought. I have come to understand that this was the problem all along. God, in His infinite love for me, has never allowed my limited thinking to limit His answers to and for me.  Because His answer is so big and all encompassing of everyone and everything around me, I don’t think I can ever come to a true understanding of what He intends to do until He does it.

Recently, I had a lovely moment where I looked around my life and realized suddenly that I had found myself no longer in a particular dark night, one that had lasted roughly 20 years to the month, but rather in the new dawn of joy.  I have a wonderful life partner in my artistic husband.  He is nothing that I imagined, but everything I could ever have hoped for.  He is both an adventure and a safe haven for me.  We have built a beautiful life together with two goofy, perfect, adorable dogs.  We have launched into seeing our dreams begin to come into reality with our creative endeavors.  Right now, we are utterly exhausted with the opportunities to do what we love, and this moment is nothing like I imagined - it is beyond what I could have hoped for.  This dawn doesn’t mean that there are not still difficulties and storms, because there are on many fronts. It means that the decades of weeping, grieving, wondering, and feeling forgotten and lost in this night, have transitioned into the dawn of endeavoring to see what God has placed in our hands and the path He has set at our feet with joy and excitement.  He did what He said He would do. I could not have imagined this in my wildest dreams. It is perfect in timing and circumstance. 

As I look at other areas that are becoming dark nights, I can set my mind to know that there will be a dawn on the other side. It is an unflinching understanding I have because He has done it before, He will do it again, and again, and again.  I won’t waste my time trying to figure out what that looks like, instead I will comfort myself knowing that there is nothing that catches Him by surprise, and that somehow, someway, in His infinite mercy and love for me, the dawn will come.  Weeping may last for the night, but joy WILL come in the morning.

Be encouraged. Cling to Him as you wipe your tears, and look at Him when you panic remembering that He loves you beyond what you can fathom, His promise will come to pass, and He will work all of this out for your good. We do not understand what that good could possibly be, but praise the Lord that His promises are not predicated on our understanding.  He will move just as He purposed to do in this moment even before you were born.  Your dawn is set.  Your dawn will come. You will rejoice with laughter when He gently reminds your soul, “See? I never ever fail.”