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Hope-full Promises

November 2009

by Karen Melang

I remember when my small children would remind me of promises that, according to them, I had made. “Mom, you promised to get us ice cream.” “You promised we could go swimming, Mom.” “When can I get my ears pierced, Mom? You promised.”

Well, not exactly. I offered them hope. I told the kids that if there were no fights in the car, we could get ice cream. That maybe, if we got our chores done on time, we could go swimming. That maybe, just maybe in a year or two we would possibly consider the idea of pierced ears. These were big ifs, maybes, and possiblies in my mind, but all they heard was the hope.

We are eager for promises from the start. We want assurances that good things will come our way from people who can be counted on to deliver. In healthy families, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, and other trusted grownups make promises and keep them. “Aunt Michelle and I will take you and three friends to the zoo for your birthday,” promises Uncle Mark, and it happens.

In the world we live in, we need promises. Promises give us hope.

Scripture is full of just the assurances we need. God’s promises reverberate through both Testaments. God is intent, it seems, on reassuring us that we are loved and cared for. God promises to be our God, never to leave us, to deliver us from danger, to forgive us, to hear us when we pray, to give us courage and peace. Here are examples of God’s promises we all know:

From the beginning, God has been making promises. In the rain­bow that Noah saw, God promised that never again would flood waters destroy all the creatures of the earth. God would never again start over from one family and an ark full of animals, no matter how infuriating humankind turned out to be.

God made a grand promise to Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of the Hebrew people. God prom­ised they would be the parents of first a son and then, through him, of many nations (Genesis 17:15–16).

God is a promise-maker, no doubt about it, and we need all the assurances and hope we can get.

Yet so often, like Sarah and Abraham, we find it difficult or impossible to trust God’s prom­ises. Lots of things get in the way.

We know what made it hard for Sarah and Abraham to trust God’s promise. How could they pos­sibly become the parents of many nations? Sarah was way past meno­pause, and they did not have even one child. The idea of starting a family at their ages was ridiculous. Promise or not, Abraham was 100 and Sarah was 90!

Some days the whole idea gave them the giggles. Geriatric Abraham and Sarah took turns laughing incredulously at the idea of themselves as parents (Genesis 17:17; 18:12). No doubt, their friends had great-grand­children. What were the chances of God’s promise being kept?

Despite the hope God gave them, they weren’t at all sure God could deliver, and they aren’t the only ones who feel that way.

Today’s manna

Years ago, when my husband was in seminary, we faced a crisis about his vocation and our future. A denomi­national squabble changed our lives drastically. We had hoped for a smooth transition from seminary to first call, a happy time with the excitement of new beginnings.

Instead, we found ourselves with no clear path ahead of us, nothing on the horizon that looked remotely like the future we had counted on. No call. No salary. Nowhere to go.

Our tiny daughter brought us enormous joy, but she also added to our worries about the future.

“God has always taken care of us before,” we kept telling ourselves. “But,” we asked each other in our next breath, “Will God take care of us tomorrow?”

I came to resent the prayer “give us this day our daily bread.” The pointed request for only today’s bread made me nervous. I wanted bread for more than today. I wanted security for the next few years of tomorrows. “Will we be okay?” I wondered often.

Then the manna story came to me, how the people of Israel marching ever so slowly in the desert toward the Promised Land, collected the white, wafer-like bread called manna (Exodus 16). Each morning the Israelites were to collect only what manna they needed for one day, no more. If they gathered an extra stash to hide under the mattress for later, the hoarded manna would turn wormy and smelly and totally disgusting.

Sooner or later, the people learned that there would always be enough manna for each day, just as God promised. They could trust God for more tomorrow. Recalling that story was an aha! moment for me in our difficult situation. Trust God today, and tomorrow God can be trusted again. Give us this day our daily bread.

Abraham and Sarah learned that God keeps promises. “The Lord did for Sarah as he had prom­ised” (Genesis 21:1). She conceived and delivered a child. They named the baby Isaac, a pun on the word laughter. Old Abraham and Sarah had guffawed at the idea that they could still become parents, and now here they were, beaming with joy at the beautiful little boy who would always remind them of laughter. God’s promise had seemed like a huge and laughable stretch, but then along came Isaac. Perhaps it was God who had the last laugh.

God promises; God delivers

The promise to Sarah and Abraham seemed impossible to fulfill. We can understand why they found God’s promise hard to swallow. But we are leery of promise-makers for other reasons, too. In the world we live in, we see promises broken and hopes dashed all the time.

Unfortunately, no one is shocked when politicians show up in the news because they have vio­lated the public trust or betrayed their families. We are not surprised when financiers who promise to manage our life savings bankrupt us instead.

We live in a cynical age. Some­times we find it difficult to trust anyone. Governments, industries, social service networks, health care, education—these have all managed to fail us. We often shrug at those who have promised too much or who never intended to deliver.

We are wary of promises because we know how hard they are to keep. Good people with good inten­tions make promises that become nothing more than false hope.

In the weeks before our wedding, I considered carefully the vows I would make. For richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, I would promise to be faithful in every way to this man. “It’s my future these vows are talking about,” I thought. “I am giving away what I do not have.”

Promises always give away the future or at least some part of it. We are reticent to make promises, because we know very well that the future may not be what we imag­ined. For a variety of reasons, we may be unable or unwilling to keep the promises we make, to deliver on the hope. So perhaps it is not sur­prising that we have trouble believ­ing God’s promises, too.

But here is the truth that Abra­ham and Sarah and countless others have learned: God promises, and God delivers. We who are desperate for assurances about our own futures have a God who owns the entire future, loves us dearly, and whose plans are for our good. Since God did not withhold his own son, St. Paul tells us, God surely will give us everything else we need (Romans 8:32).

Trusting the promise

The Bible offers us many happy-ending stories that lead us to believe those ancient people found it easier to trust God than we do. We read about the baby Isaac and likely for­get how Sarah’s monthly anguish made God’s hopeful promise seem foolish and unbelievable.

We recall the courageous Moses who demands from Pharaoh the release of the Hebrew slaves, then leads them to the hope of the Promised Land. The excuse-making Moses who quakes before the burn­ing bush tends to disappear from our mind’s eye.

These famous faithful are not the only ones who trusted God’s unlikely sounding promises.

The widow of Zarephath met the prophet Elijah as she was pre­paring a last lunch for her son and herself out of her few remaining ingredients (1 Kings 17:8–16). When he asked her to give him a cake before she fed her son and herself, she told him how little she had. But Elijah promised the widow if she fed him first that her meal and oil would not run out before the drought was over. Surely for a moment, the widow must have thought Elijah was loony. But she trusted God’s promise, baked the cake for Elijah, and realized the hope of his promise.

Is there any reason to believe that God will give us less promising futures than Abraham and Sarah, Moses, and the widow of Zarephath?

We can trust that God will never leave us regardless of the circumstances of our lives. So many have received God’s promises, and we, too, can believe that when we seek God, ask of God, and knock on God’s door, God will provide for us abundantly.

Even if you are not the type to make a fearless leap of faith (and who really is, after all?), you need not worry. When my daughter was a baby, she would often hold onto whatever part of me she could get her hands on—ears, hair, nose—and hang on for dear life as though her security depended on it.

But her security did not depend on it because I was holding on to her. Not her grip, but mine was keeping her safe. God’s arms are holding us. God’s promises can be counted on.

Nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38–39), and that’s a promise, a hope fulfilled.

Karen Melang is the executive director of Fremont Area Habitat for Humanity, Fre­mont, Neb. She is a member of the Lutheran Deaconess Conference, class of 1971.