Hope For When You Feel Trapped
My eyes glanced upward from the half bathroom in the hallway. It was the only window where I could catch a glimpse of sky from our New York City apartment. All other windows reflected brick from nearby buildings that felt like dead ends in every direction.
NYC Apartments: Courtesy of Canva
During the years of birthing babies alongside a church plant, my days felt constraining. My spirit deflated and joy waned as doubt convinced me nothing would change. Would exhaustion always feel this acutely?
I felt trapped, stuck in a limiting mindset, and restricted to prayers that remained unanswered.
Yet, that sliver of sky provided a window into life beyond my days—an unexplained hope that maybe God was working in the most hidden of ways. Looking back, I am grateful that my limitations forced my eyes upward.
In this season, my limitations look differently. I live with wide open spaces, yet my mindset continues to dwell on my constraints over my freedom.
I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. Psalm 121: 1-2 (ESV)
These verses call my gaze upward, and I’m reminded of my Creator God who is not constrained by my same limitations. If He created the heavens and earth, He exists outside of their parameters.
That’s why we can sing to Him as a Way-maker where a clear path ahead remains unseen. That’s why we can plead with him to move the mountains of burdens in our lives because He will not allow any weapon to be formed against us. It’s also why we can trust Him with the boundaries. Because He decides the shoreline, so waters won’t consume, the boundaries in our life are for our protection as well.
I recently read an article by God’s World News, a news subscription our family uses to stay updated on current events. This one in particular stopped me in my tracks.
It read, “We like knowing what time it is. But the Earth just won’t cooperate. Its spin rate changes. The planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. For the first time in history, world timekeepers may subtract one second from our clocks in a few years.
Clocks may have to skip a second—a “negative leap second”—around 2029. Earth takes about 24 hours to rotate once. But many scientists say that the Earth’s rotation has generally been slowing down by tiny amounts for centuries.
Dennis McCarthy is a retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory. He says the slowing is mostly caused by the effect of tides, which are caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon. But the rate of slowing rotation varies. And in the last five decades, the Earth seems to have sped up slightly.
Are you reading what I’m reading? I immediately thought about how much weight we put on ordering our lives around seconds, minutes, hours, and years. What if that unit of order changes in five years? Even time has to be adjusted.
Perhaps it’s another reminder that our God operates outside the limits of time. He is never-changing. Eternal. In seasons of lack or abundance, He is inviting us to order our lives around Him first. And, in Him, we will find the freedom that exists outside of time and space, grief and disappointment.
I don’t know about you, but that is good news for me today.
My times are in your hand. — Psalm 31:15 (NKJV)