Get In The Ark by Steve Farrar

Author:Steve Farrar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

6

TIME OUT

When it gets very dark, then you can see the stars.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’M OFFICIALLY CALLING a “time-out.”

Sometimes calling a time-out is the only option left.

The team is down. The opponent is formidable. You’ve been outplayed, outfoxed, outmaneuvered, outdone. And things don’t look good.

At such a point, a good coach will call a time-out.

Time out for what?

For rest.

For perspective.

For reassurance.

For strategizing.

For regrouping.

That’s why good coaches call time out. And that’s why we’ve got to call time out.

There is actually such a thing as too much of a bad thing. An obvious statement? Sure. But in the American tough-it-out, you-can-handle-it mind-set, we can easily ignore the most basic of truths. We think we should be strong, that we should handle anything and everything. But we are only human, just like Habakkuk. The human heart can only handle so much bad news. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, / But desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (Prov. 13:12).

Someone once said, “We can live forty days without food, eight days without water, and four minutes without air, but only a few seconds without hope.”

If you and I are to survive physically, emotionally, and spiritually, we’ve got to have hope. Not false hope. Real hope.

That’s what Habakkuk desperately needed.

And when we look honestly ahead, that’s what we need.

Honest Hope

People have all kinds of hope.

There is the hope to win the lottery (unlikely).

There is the hope to lose twenty pounds (possible, but difficult).

There is the hope that God will always be there for you (true).

There is the hope that hidden within God’s judgment will be certain blessing for the faithful (unexpectedly, but absolutely true).

But did you notice that little word hidden? Don’t forget it. It’s important.

Hidden Truth

At first I didn’t see it. I couldn’t see it. And then it became very clear.

My wife and I had just walked into an art gallery in Cannon Beach, Oregon. As we walked through the door, immediately in front of us we saw a very unique painting in only two colors: brown and white. It was a landscape scene of winter: brown grass, brown rocks on a hillside, all covered with a light dusting of snow. It is amazing how beautiful such a scene could be in just brown and white.

I took one step closer to move out of the doorway. And that’s when I saw it! Actually there were two. There’s another one! And one to the right!

Then Mary said, “Do you see the baby by her mother?”

What we suddenly saw—that we hadn’t seen at first—were four camouflaged brown-and-white pinto horses. In fact, I have the print sitting in an open book on my desk as I write. I just pulled it off the shelf. I haven’t looked at it in three or four years. I immediately saw the four adult pintos, but it was several seconds before I saw the little colt. They are so perfectly blended into the setting that I had to carefully look again to make sure I hadn’t missed one.

When artist Bev Doolittle made the prints of Pintos available for sale in 1979, they cost $65.

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