Hope for sale

(Warning: this blog contains strong Christian content)

It was an overcast day in 2010 and looking up I saw an elderly couple walking towards me along the canal bank. The man was walking gingerly with a stick and the woman was carrying what looked like a folded duvet. They had tears streaming down their faces. They had been narrowboat owners for many years but were now walking away from their boat for the last time having had to accept that the husband was no longer safe to carry on boating (he had recently fallen in for the second time and had been incapable of getting himself out of the water without help). My heart breaks every time I remember that encounter.

Well, we too have come to the same painful conclusion and have put our own narrowboat, Hope, up for sale. It was not an easy decision but it is the right one as I now struggle even to climb onto deck from the cabin, let alone operate locks or leap ashore onto uneven terrain. I can just about remember my leaping days! 😀

So why does it hurt so much to sell our boat when we were quite content to move away from the house we had lived in so happily for 20 plus years (see my previous blog When a home becomes a house)? I think it is simply that our emotions in relation to our old house relate to past memories, of the good times we had shared with family and friends, but the emotion in relation to the boat is about the adventures we had planned to have in the future; adventures that now we will never have.

We don’t yet know the prognosis for my condition and whether it is life limiting. I have often pondered what happens if it turns out this muscular dystrophy takes my life prematurely and have concluded that I am not afraid of dying. But I am absolutely FURIOUS about the prospect of missing out on all the things that we planned to do together!

We named the boat ‘Hope’ based on the verse from Hebrews 6 v19 which says ‘We have this hope [the promises of God] as an anchor to the soul, firm and secure’. (We had considered calling the boat Hope & Anchor but decided that sounded too much like the name of a pub, which wasn’t quite the image we wanted to portray).

The name speaks of our conviction that our lives are in God’s hands and he is rooting for us. That is an easy testimony to give when everything in your life is going swimmingly, but rather more challenging when the ‘wheels have fallen off your cart’. And yet it is in these darker days when it is more important than ever to hang onto the truth that God is for us, for without hope in God’s goodness then life is literally hope-less.

This blog is entitled ‘Hope for sale’ but I am thankful that refers only to 15.5 tons of steel that we were pleased to call home for a while. The true ‘hope that endures’ can never be for sale.