Here is the bottom line. Here and now is simply not forever. This world is not the paradise we were designed to live in. As you live in the here and now, the brokenness of this world will collide again and again with the longing hardwired inside you. Yes, sin twists and bends that longing, and it becomes scarily self-absorbed and self-focused. Yes, you will always find ways in which to insert yourself into the center of your world, the one place no human being is supposed to be because it is God’s place. You will have times when you moan and complain in your self-absorbed disappointment that life doesn’t operate according to your sovereign plan. In your disappointment and anger, you will lash out against the people who live closet to you. You will doubt that the world is under any control whatsoever and fantasize about how much better the world would be if you had the controller in your hands.
Sadly, we all do these things in some way. But with all the ways sin causes us to lose our way, we still get up every day and hook our hope to something. Everything we do is somehow attached to hope. So here is what we need to keep in mind: the brokenness and longing that intersect in our hearts are meant not to drive us to cynicism and despair, but to God. As we begin to realize that in this broken world we cannot look for reliable hope horizontally, we are at the edge of what we were designed to do: hope in God. And as we begin to place our hope in God, we get connected to the promise of eternity, where all that is broken will be fixed and made new again. And as we do this, we look at life in a radically new way. We no longer ask the broken people, places, and things to be the source of our hope. We know they can’t be, because they are broken and in need of renewal just like we are.
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