Deferred Hope

I am tired of deferred hope.

I've been reading a book this Advent season. "Behold the Lamb of God: An advent Narrative"  which has been so beautiful to journey with this advent season.

Recently the reading was about the time that the Israelites spent as slaves in Egypt...here's a bit of what it says...

"Four hundred years was enough time to convince the people they were meant to be slaves in Egypt. But this was not who they were. Late in the evening when the workday was done, the parents settled in around the fire and told their children the old, old stories of the generations before...

The children could sense in their parents that these were more than stories from the past. They were somehow still connected to the present and pushing forward to the future. From the stories, it seemed like the God of their fathers used to appear to them on a regular basis. He used to shake the earth. He even wrestled with Jacob on the banks of the Jabbok, wherever that was.

And all of this, they were told, was because God had promised to take Abraham's descendants as his people - to love them with an everlasting love and to never, ever leave them.

so where had he gone? where was he now?"

400 years is a long time to defer hope.
i can imagine how despair would creep into the communal heart as the years pounded on.

I am tired of deferred hope.

I also know this is not the end of the story.