Our basement is wet and moldy, and has left no storage container untouched. Our kitchen is in the early stages of renovation, and as far as I can tell, the dust has already reached every surface between here and Canada. My winter clothes are hanging in the living room, my treasured pour-over coffee routine now requires two or three trips upstairs to the bathroom sink, and our current outlet situation demands that you choose between powering the fridge or the microwave, the kettle or the wi-fi router. Not both.

While these are overwhelmingly privileged problems, to be sure, the state of our house seems to mirror the disarray existing inside of me. In such a jarring season, it’s easy to put my hope in what’s quick. The house will be clean again. Soon, I won’t be so sad. The kitchen will be finished in three weeks –and with a dishwasher. But the house will be messy soon after it’s clean, the sadness never passes as quickly as you’d like it to, the dishwasher will need to be unloaded. There will always be plenty of reasons, big and small, to resign myself to discontentment, dissatisfaction, disappointment with the things I hoped would be different.

So much of life is constantly changing –breaking, dirtying, shifting with a propensity for disorder. It’s why my hope was never meant to hinge on such things –the clean house, the new kitchen, the zeroed inbox, the promising relationship, the right job, the right feelings, the right haircut. None of these things are permanent, and there isn’t one that hasn’t let me down. But, my hope is in this:

He will set all things right.

Job said in the midst of unthinkable suffering, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.” He will be lifted high, we who are in Christ will be made like him, and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. This is the surest thing. We can hang all of our hope here, and it will hold.

It’s striking to me that God can use the busted mundane to remind us that our hearts hunger for something sure, and to magnify the beauty of our ‘it is finished’ future. When my hope is fixed on Jesus, the messy house, the shifting feelings, the broken relationship, and even this renovation dust that’s spreading like the plague won’t lead me to despair. Let my longing for the restoration of these things teach me to hope in the restoration of all things, I whisper. And let it be so.