Divine foolishness

Sandy Davis was a modern day Jeremiah. After 3 years of attentive care to her husband as his body deteriorated to death from Parkinson’s, Sandy was diagnosed 6 months later with cancer. The next two years were spent battling for her own life, even to the point of remission. Yet, the siege had not ended.
In what would be her final year of life, Sandy decided to buy the farm.

Despite facing constant fatigue, a housing market that had bottomed out, fluid build up in her lungs, record foreclosures, the daunting task of moving, and a cancer that had literally spread everywhere, Sandy decided to place her mountain home for the last 20+ years on the market and buy a foreclosure condo near her old hometown by the coast. She wanted to see the sun that winter. She wanted to see the beach again. She wanted to keep living and planning for the future because she knew there was something to look forward to.

Now, it is no good looking for fairy tale endings in life. Sandy died of cancer without ever again really being able to enjoy that sand between your toes day after day. That is beside the point, however. She lived—and died—in faith.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Aunt Sandy would want the last year of her life to be tied up with the stress and trouble of selling a home in a market that had crashed, moving/packing and leaving your closest friends, and investing in some foreclosed piece of real estate hundreds of miles away. Then, I stumbled over Jeremiah 32 and God’s promise that “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

The reality was that Sandy was building on a hope far in the future. She didn’t expect to benefit herself so much from this foreclosed piece of land near the coast she bought. But, she knew all along that "houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land." That in some far off future, someone else would be seeing that sun, and walking that beach, and feeling that sand between their toes.

Jeremiah's field was to him what the condo on the coast was to Sandy—a sign of life, of hope, and a refusal to allow despair to be the final word. To act out our faith is not always easy. Sometimes we would like certainty and absolutes. But we fail to realize that certainty and absolutes are no longer faith.