Dear friends, today author, speaker and dear friend Cynthia Ruchti joins us with her wonderful words and new book, Ragged Hope: Surviving the Fallout of Other People's Choices. I hope you find her words encouraging and strengthening as we continue to seek Abba for our hope. Leave a comment too as I'll choose two names to receive a copy of her new book. HOPE RUSH

I wonder how long it took Eve to find hope again. The Bible shows us some of her misery—her shame, her hollowness, her sense of abandonment, the emotional distance in her marriage, her grief over losing one son and becoming the mother of a murderer in the same moment… We can imagine the rest. She and Adam stayed together, somehow working through their disappointment in one another.

Throughout unnaturally long lifespans, they slogged through the dailies, the joys and jolts of family life, the challenges of wringing a living out of an earth that no longer cooperated as it once had. When did hope return for Eve? And where did she find it?

In the eyes of her newborn, Seth, a child whose name was chosen “because God has given me another child in place of Abel, whom Cain killed” (Genesis 4:25, CEB)? Or was it months earlier when she first felt new life stir within her? After Seth became a father and his son Enosh was born, a small phrase was shoe-horned into the biblical account. “At that time, people began to worship in the Lord’s name” (Genesis 4:26b, CEB). Did Eve reclaim hope through worship?

My husband is a fan of gold rush reality shows. Mining for gold in the Yukon. Mining in South America. Mining in Alaska. Mining under water. Mining in 1849. I assume within him is a latent pioneer/prospector spirit that enjoys watching the pursuit of the prize without getting frostbitten, muddy, bug-bitten, or killed. A common thread in the shows is the harsh reality that the gold is rarely lying there on the surface, waiting to be collected like ripe blueberries waiting to be picked from the shoulder-high bushes in our yard. The miners have to dig deep, move boulders, sometimes bulldoze acres of frozen tundra or mucky jungle to get to the hidden pockets of gold, the little flecks that add up to a fortune. Why would we assume the hope we’re so hungry for would be any different?

Yes, at times, the nuggets of hope are lying right there on the surface. Easy pickings. But sometimes we have to move boulders and plow through permafrost to find that small flash of wonder that tells us there’s more, if we keep digging. Eve may have waited a very long time for her first glimpse at a bright speck of hope. But did she catch the brilliance of tenderness when God clothed her in an animal skin? For all His disappointment in her failure, His love would not relent. He cared that she felt ashamed. Hope laced the edges of her existence from Day One. Well, Day Six.

If you and I have to dig for hope, looking hard and long for reasons to be grateful, joyful, hopeful in the middle of our current circumstances, why should that surprise us? And why would we think hope would be diminished in any way by our having to search for it? Proverbs 25:2 tells us, “It is the glory of God to hide something and the glory of kings to discover something.” A kind word buried in a husband’s rant about his bad day at work. A last, startlingly colorful bloom hanging on one more day despite the cold snap. Good numbers in a lab test. One more chemo week conquered. An aging parent remembering our name this time. Digging for hope? That’s what starts a hope rush—finding treasure buried under acres of barren-looking life. 

Author and speaker Cynthia Ruchti tells stories of Hope-that-glows-in-the-dark through her novels, novellas, devotions, nonfiction, and through speaking events for women and writers. The epigraph of her latest nonfiction—Ragged Hope: Surviving the Fallout of Other People’s Choices—reads, “To the wounded, the worn, the wondering. And to those who let us see their scars so others can discover Hope’s hideout.” For more about this or other books and speaking topics, connect with her at cynthiaruchti.com or www.facebook.com/CynthiaRuchtiReaderPage.