Hope for the future!

Be amazed and perish,
for in your days I am doing a work,
a work that you will never believe, even if someone tells you.  Acts 13:41


I suppose it could be my age.  I suppose it could be that I have several people I know who are now dead who, in their lifetime, were fractious a good bit of the time. They weren't easy to love, and they seemed completely out of touch with the guiding principles of Christ's call to be humble and loving, forgiving and forgiven.  


Anyway, for some reason today's reading nourishes hope as I think about the "unloveable" traits of some folks who have died. 


I think of grandma, whose goodness was always overshadowed by her fear of the unknown, and her insistence that it was either "her way, or the highway". She left behind her a wake of stressed or broken relationships.


 I think of my dad, who lived a life rooted in secrecy. In fact one of the ways he suffered in old age was that his exaggerated stories of grandeur or prosperity were so complex that he literally could not keep track of what he had said to whom, and he was constantly being confronted with their anger that he had, essentially, lied to them.  


In life, these two were sources of confusion and pain for most of the family.  Still, there is something miraculous about what God has worked in the years since their deaths.  The goodness their names generate in my mind surpasses the confusion of being in their physical presence.


 Long ago we all forgave these people for their antics.  And suddenly we began to understand more about how their situations had formed and cemented their poor habits.  We began to see them through the gentle gaze of love so that we could see (and then recall) aspects of goodness and possibility that were hidden when our lives were directly involved with theirs.  


Isn't it wonderful and amazing that God does unbelievable and marvelous things that we can't see (even if somebody tells us!)?  That gives me hope.  It frees me from wrestling with the awful tendency to judge others and remind myself boldly that there is always, always more going on than what meets my eye -- especially in those regions where I am prone to be in a defensive or self-protective mode.  It also gives me hope that when I am no longer part of this or that scene or relationship, God's breath of life will fan whatever small embers of truth and goodness were there beneath the surface of my own imperfect ways.  


Are there places and spaces, activities and relationships where you see things evolving that reach beyond the span and scope of your life?  Are there sprouts of life or (even more amazingly) aspects of enduring and expanding goodness in areas that you yourself have decided have come to an end.  And, finally, are there places where goodness is growing exponentially even though you (by your own admission) fell short of hope and love when you were actively involved?