When the Plan Is Exile

By Hannah Comerford

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you a hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11)

This verse was every teenager’s life verse when I was in youth group. I’ve seen it on plaques and in greeting cards. It’s used to bring comfort and assurance in the midst of difficult circumstances.

But what if those plans God has for us are painful?

I don’t want to deny that God can bring comfort through it. He does work all things together for good (Romans 8:28). So the sentiment that God has plans for us is true. But Jeremiah 29:11 is much more complex and not as easy as it might seem.

I tend toward the pessimistic end of the attitude spectrum. When things go wrong, it’s easy for me to dwell on the negative and get frustrated by pat answers and efforts to cheer me up. And, well, I won’t pretend like the last couple of years have been easy at Elim. We’ve seen three pastors leave for various reasons in a short amount of time. I don’t doubt that God is in control of these situations and is working good in us, but it’s hard. We might have a future and a hope, but right now we’re living in a hard place. It’s painful.

And I think that’s okay.

If you look at Jeremiah 29:11 in context, God isn’t actually offering a hope for immediate good things. God was speaking through Jeremiah to the exiled people of Israel. They’d been forcefully taken to Babylon. They’d lost everything. Other prophets were telling them good news, that their exile would be short and they’d be going home soon. They wanted to cling to those promises. Yet God wasn’t speaking through those prophets. He wasn’t telling them to prepare for their happy return.

Instead, God told the people through Jeremiah that they should build houses, marry, plant gardens—settle in for the long haul. God was going to keep them in Babylon for 70 years, and then they would see their release from captivity, the hope and the future they were promised in verse 11.

God was calling His people to trust Him and find peace where they were placed, even though it was heartbreaking.

I don’t know what the future holds for Elim. Of course, we aren’t exiles in Babylon, but it’s okay to acknowledge that this isn’t a comfortable place to be in. Some of us miss how things used to be, the comfort we had in the home that Elim was to us. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s okay to be homesick.

But maybe we can learn to find comfort now, when we don’t see the future. Maybe we can trust that God will still be with us even here, in the uncomfortable places, when we don’t have our bright future yet. Maybe we won’t see the future and hope for a long while, but we can learn to grow and live and find contentment in the exile.

We don’t know when we’ll welcome our good future. But we do have a God who is with us now, in the land that doesn’t feel like home.

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