yellow days

At Jake's school they use a color system to support self control and good behavior.   Green choices are great.  All go!  Yellow gives a warning.  Caution, slow down!  Red means stop. Rethink!    Of course, his teachers, his parents. and even the other students in his class held up "green" as the only respectable position.  Jake came into church one night looking like he'd been put through the ringer and hung out to day.  "Miss Laurie," he said, "why do they care so much that I stay on green?  Yellow is so much easier.  I am a yellow kind of guy." 

On this second day in Lent, I feel very much like a yellow kind of girl.  I have committed daily writing (something that would normally come easily to me) and today the thoughts are not flowing.  I committed to abandon my long term relationship with the snooze button. But after a night with only three hours of fitful sleep this morning we were reunited again.   On this second day in the journey, I have already stumbled. 

Yellow is much easier.  The bar sits too high to reach.  Surely, I am not meant to soar over it.  The race is too long,  Surely, I will not finish it.  But, I hear:  

"Even youths grow tired and weary,
       and young men stumble and fall;

  but those who hope in the LORD
       will renew their strength.
       They will soar on wings like eagles;
       they will run and not grow weary,
       they will walk and not be faint."

                          Isaiah 40:31

Yellow may me much easier, but we were created for even better than green.  If I can soar like an eagle, why would I settle for looking at the sky? If I can run and not grow weary why would I settle to trudge through heavyhearted?  We can.  We will-- if our hope lies in the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of all.

Hope is a nebulous thing.  We wish for 'green'er pastures.  We dream of brighter days ahead.   Politicians have won the attention of the world on the mere concept of hope.  Who can argue with hope?   But what is it really that we are talking about?   If our hope is in the LORD, we find our desires, our refuge our strength, and our rallying cry wrapped up in the essence of who and what He is.  This journey depends on that vision.  Forty days or four thousand years cannot exhaust it.

If we, insignificant and overwhelmed in our endeavors, are engulfed in the Lord, when we stumble we can get up covered in that renewed strength.   If we are consumed with Him, in that vision of hope, our failings can do little to diminish it.  On the second day of the journey, my shortcomings in terms of my   small, tiny, piddly goals have served to point me toward the His magnitude, His might and His mercy.  May I stop and revel in what I see there.