There is a woman in my mind. She is some sort of hybrid of a lot of beautiful thoughts, gathered from a lot of different places.
Every morning, when the day is dawning and the light is crisp, she can be found somewhere in her home with a cup of coffee and a Bible. On busy, hectic, or hurried mornings, she skips the coffee.
She is full of peace.
She smiles often.
She is quiet, not the self-conscious kind of quiet, but the quiet of a person who knows truth of herself well enough to not need constant reassurance of thoughts and words.
When she is harmed or spoken badly of and someone who loves her fights to "avenge her honor" and set the perpetrator straight, she looks at this loved one sternly and says, "Don't you know I know who I am?"
She knows want well enough to know it's not forever and to trust.
She has the courage to apologize, even when it is humiliating, because she is not afraid of being humbled.
She is generous with all she has.
She has a lot of friends who are very different from her. She knows how to love people who disagree with her.
She is true to herself.
She really believes that something about God is revealed everywhere she looks. She believes this because she really sees it.
Today I thought about this woman for the first time in a long while, and thinking about her gives me hope. This woman does not, to me, sound young. When I grow to be her age, I hope I will be a lot more like her. And I have hope that I will be different from her in ways that I can't yet imagine, ways that are really beautiful. I think this kind of hope, the hope that things will be a little different than what you can imagine, is what makes life so much better to live than just to think about.
Romans 8:24 "For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?" I hope to become the woman I was made to be. And I hope because I think she is more than the woman in my head.
