Hope for the Present
More and more Christians today are discovering the joy of being healed in their heart and mind from painful things in their past. Jesus came to "bind up the broken-hearted" and He means for this to be commonplace among His people. In many cases, we are healed when God reinterprets our experiences for us or adds to our story in ways we had not seen before. Or to put it another way, much of our healing of the past has come from seeing and hearing our story the way God sees it and tells it. And having had it redeemed, we are able to live differently in the present.
Well, what if we could apply that same principle to our experiences in the present? Whatever hardships we are going through right now are all subject to God's redemptive healing that might happen at any time, maybe soon, maybe in a few years. He will at some point retell the story of what we are feeling at present, and His perceptions of our experience will heal our wounds and restore our heart. That is our hope. And knowing He will redeem even this present moment means that we can be glad He is with us and already at work in us to restore us from this, too. That is a hope that can impact our present.
We are all caught up in the middle of our own story, that to us is still being written. We cannot see how it will turn out. But God is in our story, too, as our hero who will overcome all evil and bring about good things out of bad. We live in a redemptive story! And God will finish what He started! That is our hope, and it is real. It even changes the present, though we cannot see the end.
One of the best songs to capture this way of seeing our present life is Unredeemed by Selah.