The Adventure Worth Our Greatest Hopes

Every great adventure story begins with a man or woman setting out to find something worth looking for. It might be a romance, a dragon that needs slaying, or discovering who they are. Whatever it is, the cause is worthy, something valuable enough to endure the adversity they are destined to experience on the journey. And most of all, it is something human, because we are drawn to it when we read these stories or see them on the movie screen. There is something deeper to them than just “adventure.”

Adventure leads us to an answer. It unveils a deeper purpose in our lives, but if we are only looking at the surface, we miss it. We only see the mighty battle of the dragon or the love story of the prince and princess. For it is within those events that the true beauty lies; the answer to a deep, human problem is solved.

The other day, I read through Psalm 65, and it led me to write about this very adventure. Because in this psalm, I think that David is trying to show that God’s righteousness displayed satisfies our greatest hopes on earth. When we are subconsciously asking ourselves the question, “is God great enough to satisfy my greatest hopes?” David assures us that he does:

“By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness, O God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas; the one who by his strength established the mountains, being girded with might; who stills the roaring of the seas, the roaring of the waves, the tumult of the peoples, so that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs. You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy.”

That third line highlights the message I’m trying to convey. David mentions hope as something that everyone – from the ends of the earth to the farthest seas – desires, and God in his majesty answers us. He provides salvation, power, and signs. He provides an answer. That is the hope in the adventure of life, that our greatest efforts would not be in vain but produce a harvest of righteousness in God’s answers.

Bilbo Baggins, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, sets out on a great adventure to help some dwarves reclaim their homeland from a dragon. After many moments of being close to death and making it through, he achieves his goal and finds himself back where he began: his home. But he didn’t just go out for a stroll, he had an adventure, and in his words, “I am going back to my hobbit-hole without a pocketful of gold… though I shall have a good deal to live on.” Bilbo recognized the value of his adventure because it wasn’t just about the gold or the food or the memories, but the answers he found about himself.

Every adventurer hopes to find what they set out looking for, and when they do, everything they did to get there becomes worth it. For us, the adventure of life is found when we realize that God satisfies our greatest hopes. Dwelling in his presence and following his light provides a beauty to life that we cannot go back on once we get a taste of it. And the life we live for God is not in vain, because it’s all a part of the adventure.