Hope 10 & 11 - Present and Future

It's been a full last few days and was planning on writing two separate posts until I re-read both yesterday's passage (Psalm 146) and the one for today Isaiah 29:17-21. As I read them, what I heard was hope in the present and hope in the future. Psalm 146 spoke of the present for me - verses 5-9 speak of what God is doing in the "right now" -

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

It's all about what God is doing right then and there - hope in the right now.

Then Isaiah speaks of what is to come...Verse 17 begins, "In just a very short time" and proceeds to talk of the hope coming to the deaf, the blind, the downtrodden, the poor...But "in a very short time."

Hope feels that way to me - there are elements of hope that we can see in the immediate and they are clear. In the image today, my son made these out of LEGO and without any prompting from me about why I was asking him to make these, one he made showing things that gave him hope - daily needs (food, etc), beauty in the flowers, an element of creation, and then the colors that make up the E. Many of these we see in the right now. But then the other isn't as clear - it isn't clear what makes up the letters like the foreground, but you can still read H O P E. It's out there, but its not yet. Finally I took these pictures at the center of the prayer labyrinth we had at our church last night and today - one on the path of the journey leading to the center and the other right in the middle. Present and future.

Hope can be both. In the present. In the future. God is in both. Thanks be to God!