Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.
(Psalm 20:7)

I am a dreamer.   I dream of conversations that may or may not ever happen. I dream of future events I would love to see transpire.  And give me a hint as to the path I could be headed, and in no time I will have the perfect–or what I envision to be the perfect–path laid out in front of me.    And as a dreamer, I hope.  I hope that what I dream will indeed become reality.

Yet a couple of months ago, I found myself e-mailing a friend actually asking her to pray I would stop hoping in my dreams for a bit.  Why? I had become a bit leery of hoping because I did not want to feel the let down that comes with shattered dreams.  I was afraid if I put my hope in this one direction, I’d be hurt if it went in another.  I was tired of not having a place to set my sights.

And that is when God began speaking to me an important truth.  For as I bowed in prayer to Him and shared my heart, He spoke three words to me:  hope in Me.  Hope in Me.  These very words were spoken several times by David.

Hope in God.

Think about it.  Are we to place our hopes in jobs?   Nope.  In people?  Nope.  In where we live?  Nope.   Jobs vary, people fail, and places change, but God never changes, never fails, and is with us wherever we go.  Therefore, our hope must remain in God.  In God alone.

So now here I am a couple of months beyond that moment when I was afraid to hope, and my hope remains.  My hope, that is, in God.

And God has yet to (and never will) let me down.

Has He done everything the way I would have anticipated?  Nope.  Not in the least.  Yet what He has done has exceeded what I had and could ever have dreamed up on my own.  Things I thought were setbacks were actually stepping stones–stepping stones along God’s perfect path.

I am not sure where you may be in your journey as you read this.  But from one sojourner to another, I encourage you to fix your eyes upon and place your hope in God.   Whether you think you know where you are going or wonder where you are going, set your sights on God.  Set up camp under the shadow of His almighty wings.  He will direct your paths. And even more, He will do infinitely more than you could ever hope or imagine on your own.

“Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord his God”
(Psalm 146:5)