What's around the bend?

It's a bittersweet day today.  One of my most favorite co-workers ever is working her last day with us and my heart hurts.  She's leaving so she can be a stay-at-home mom to her baby boy who is due to arrive very soon.  And I don't know if it hurts because of how much I'll miss her and how hard it will feel to work with someone new.  Or if it hurts because it brings up my own ache and longings for more and for change in my own life. 

When I look with hope into my own future, it's hard not to wonder what will be there.  I can't help but wonder if this is it.  If this is all there is for me in this life that I get to live.  If this is my life forever and if God could or will ever bring about the changes we have been so desperately hoping for.  Some days I feel only discouragement and then guilt over my own discontentment.

So much of me wants to be happy and content right where I am, right now.  I want to be a woman full of gratitude because I have been given so much.  My life is full, really.  But, it's the longings though - those unfulfilled places where you hope and ache and want.  It's on the days when you look change and more in the face for someone else, and it feels hard.  It's difficult to see what you still don't have, what you are still waiting for and where you still are. 

I don't know where I will continue to journey on this life.  I don't know if things will change as I hope or if they will turn unexpectedly into something else.  It seems as though God only knows as only He is supposed to. 

My hope is that on days like today where discouragement tries to weasel its way into my day and my life and fill me with questions and doubts.  And when discontentment tries to breed and make itself at home in my heart, that I can be filled with rest.  With hope.  And that I can have courage in the waiting.

Not because things will change or because I will suddenly get everything I'm wanting.  But because He has me.  Because He loves me and knows what is best.  Because His timing is usually right on even if I don't think so.

He knows what's around that bend.  And in time, I will too.