Yet...

There is a phrase found in Scripture (Job 13:15) that says, “Yet will I hope.” That word “yet” is pregnant with meaning. Three little letters that carry a world of possibility inside their tiny confines. The word scares us because of what has to come before it. It’s always negative, otherwise there would be no reason for “yet.” “Yet” could mean anything. “Yet” can be the smallest problem or massive disaster. It could be a busted alternator and a barren bank account; it could be a busted heart. It could be lost work or lost loved-one; a barren womb or a barren soul; a scratched cornea or pancreatic cancer; one thing or ten things. As Rob Bell points out in NOOMA: Rain, “It always rains, doesn’t it?” There is a saying in King James English to describe these phenomenon: the crappeth hath hitteth the faneth. It happens and 99% of the time there is little we can do to predict or control it. We stop and stare at what’s going on, unable to move or breathe, speak or think, like a Sasquatch caught by a tourist’s video camera, knowing intuitively that nothing will ever be the same.

Yet…

It isn’t such a bad word after all. Maybe it is fraught with possibility. Maybe, instead of indicating a problem it signifies a new day is dawning, the endless night of Antarctic winter is over, and the sunrise is coming. Maybe “yet” is an assertion of will against the present circumstance, the past mistakes and the future troubles: “I will not be mastered by despair, by anxiety, by guilt.” “Yet is a loving gaze skyward, towards the God who “knows the plans He has for us...plans for a hope…” It is looking out to a barren field and seeing the growth that can come. it is a radical trust in the face of an overwhelming foe. It is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel when you can’t see the end of the tunnel and everything in you says, “There is no end to the tunnel.”

“Yet” is an infant in a feed trough, born into a dark world to set people free from fear of today, tomorrow and yesterday. He is an infant born to give fullest possible meaning to the word “yet.”

shalom, matt