The Door of Hope

This is a journal entry from February 2, 2007:
[I awoke this morning with the phrase "The Valley of Achor is a door of hope". It kept repeating in my mind. I looked up the passage in Hosea where it speaks about this.

"Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her, there I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt." Hosea 2:14, 15 (NIV)

What stood out to me from reading this passage is that God restores her vineyards while she is in the desert. The word achor means trouble. The Valley of Achor is turned into a place of hope. I was a person without hope. I had lost many vineyards. I was led into a time or season of trouble. Yet in the midst of that trouble God has been speaking tenderly to me. ]

It is interesting to look back over the past two years of my life in light of this passage in Hosea. I found myself in a Valley of Achor that appeared to be a desert. Many of the activities that I had been involved in on a regular basis were no longer a part of my life. It felt as if all was stripped away and there was no hope to be seen. Yet that is the place that has become the haven of healing and wholeness where God began to restore my vineyards.

When I came to faith in Jesus as a young teenager I had a life of promise ahead of me. I was in a young peoples' choir that put on Gilbert & Sullivan operettas and I was a cast member in "The Mikado". I had been taking dance lessons and I even took part in a Messianic-style liturgical dance group. I did well in school and I was contemplating going on to university. I had spent a summer in France on an immersion course and I was proficient in French. I took a Creative Writing Course in my last year of high school. I also took an active role in my school's ISCF group. For all intents and purposes my life did look promising. My life plans got derailed and I even began sacrificing my individuality and adopted a life of conformity to an imposed norm of Christian behavior that was legalistic in nature.

A door is something that one goes through to get from one place to the next. Faith has been described as a quality that goes through something in order to receive the promise on the other side of the trouble. God led me to various doors of opportunity to walk through; and in the process of walking through God has given me back my vineyards. It is never too late to rekindle lost dreams. They may not be revived in their original forms, but the seed is still present. As I have walked through those doors I have flourished and I have been given a hope that will not be deferred.