WE’RE CLOSING IN on the end of the book of Micah; only 10 verses to go. The final chapter, as we’ve seen, opens with the prophet’s personal words of misery, and this is quickly followed by his description of Judah’s complete moral collapse. Yet the book does not end in defeat. True, Babylon is coming. Destruction is coming. Exile is coming. But exile will not be the end of the story.

In the previous post, we read the confident words of the city of Jerusalem, now humbled and resigned to her fate. Indeed, the words could be read as if they were written during the time of exile. She has fallen; after the invasion of Babylon, who could deny that fact? The ruined city sits in darkness. And still she looks forward to a reversal of fortune. What has fallen will rise; darkness will turn to light. The God who brought a covenant lawsuit against his people will become her defender instead, and Jerusalem’s enemies will regret mocking her and her God.

Thus, Micah’s prophetic personification of Jerusalem portrays her as chastened but hopeful. All of her sins, all the ways she has been unfaithful to the covenant, have led to a devastating chapter in her history. But the story will not remain tragic. She sees herself as part of an ongoing and unfolding drama in which God will renew his covenant mercies. God is not done, and there is still hope.

MANY OF YOU reading this are going through a difficult chapter of life yourself, whether the difficulties are of your own making or not. Think for a moment about how you would tell your story. What led to your situation, and where do you think the story is going? Suffering tends to capture our attention, and it can be hard to see beyond it. If all you see is your current chapter and the chapters before, life can feel desperate and tragic. You can, of course, pray for an immediate and miraculous reversal, and God may indeed graciously grant your wish. But our own experience as well as a host of biblical stories suggest that there are still long seasons of watching and waiting that must be endured on the way to any turnaround that may be coming.

To have hope, then, we need to inhabit a story that empowers our ability to wait.

One potentially helpful way to think about this is through a model of hope proposed by Christian psychologist Everett Worthington for working with distressed couples. He builds on the earlier, research-based model of C. R. Snyder, who spoke of hope as a combination of “the will and the ways.” Hopeful people, Snyder taught, believe in the power of their own decisive action. That’s the “will.” But in any given situation, they must also be able to envision courses of action that might help. Those are the “ways.”

Recasting Snyder’s ideas, Worthington speaks of hope in terms of “willpower” (having the motivation to change) plus “waypower” (seeing realistic pathways for change). But he adds a third element: “waitpower.” We may see something we can do and be motivated to do it. But we also need the perseverance to let go of our expectations of a quick fix and endure the slow process of change.

Thinking of Micah 7, then, the question is: what fuels our “waitpower”? Remember the history: even if Judah fully and humbly accepts its fate (as if they had a choice!), the people will have to remain in Babylon for decades before the Persian king Cyrus releases them to return to the land they once called home. What might sustain their ability to endure the waiting? And what sustains ours?

To put the question a little differently: where’s the hope in the stories we tell about our lives? We typically think of ourselves as the heroes or heroines of our own life stories, and we naturally want those stories to have a happy ending — with the ending being the day we die. But the New Testament teaching on hope is more about what happens after we die, about resurrection and eternal life in the presence of God.

Our life stories are important, but they’re not ultimate. To have hope in the biblical sense is to see ourselves as part of something that began long before we were born, something that will continue long after we die. God is the hero of that story; God is the main character, not us. We need to stop thinking of God as a character in our stories, and to imagine instead that we are characters in his story, a story whose plot moves steadily toward redemption, restoration, and resurrection.

Things look different when we make that shift. Our lives may be difficult and painful in the present. But if our hope is in the future outcome of God’s story — a story with a happy ending that by grace includes us — it puts today’s struggles in perspective. The more we know that resurrection is our God-given destiny, the less we fear death, and the more we are empowered to live in ways that are infused with resurrection newness now.

May God grant us the power to wait, and thus to find hope.