The dreams we hold inside the interiors of our hearts have the power to break us. That’s why we guard them so closely. The longer we hold to them, the more deeply we lock them away, especially if anyone has made us feel that our hope isn’t a worthy one.

Yet we can’t help but hope, can we? We seem premade with a capacity to believe there is something better ahead, something more than we are currently experiencing.

The world tells us to buckle down, try hard, and plan for what we want. But the problem is that nothing truly worth hoping for and hoping in comes by human effort. We can read all the right articles and detail all the steps we need to take to reach our goals, but the biggest, brightest hopes come from God alone.

This is perhaps why our deepest longings reside in closed-off spaces of our hearts: because we give up control when we acknowledge that God is the only one who can bring our hopes to pass. The restored relationship, the long-awaited child, the freedom from addiction, the end of a dry spiritual season, and many more.

The pieces of our hearts that hold our most tightly guarded hopes can become the very places of faith God longs to call us into.