This is a long post from “Farmer Girl” (FB), but very good! Amen! 🙏🕊️🙌
“Hebrews 6:19 says, “We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain.” I have read that verse plenty of times, but the more you actually look at what an anchor does, the better the comparison gets. Because an anchor is not something you use to make the weather behave itself. You do not toss an anchor overboard and suddenly the wind stops, the waves flatten out, the clouds disappear, and everyone gets to continue their pleasant little boat ride like nothing happened. That would be a significantly different piece of equipment and I suspect sailors would be extremely interested in purchasing one. An anchor has a much less glamorous job. The wind can keep blowing. The waves can keep coming. The current can keep pushing. The anchor's job is to keep all of those forces from taking the boat wherever they feel like taking it.
There is quite a bit of physics happening here. A boat on the water is being acted on by forces constantly. Wind pushes against the portion above the water. Currents push against the hull below it. Waves transfer energy into the boat and make it rise, fall, roll, pitch, and generally remind anyone with a questionable stomach that land was actually a perfectly lovely invention. If nothing counteracts those forces, the boat drifts. It may not drift very quickly, which is actually part of the problem. Move a tiny amount every minute for enough minutes and eventually you can be a very long way from where you started. You do not have to be violently thrown somewhere to become lost. Sometimes all it takes is a little pressure in the same direction for a long enough time.
An anchor provides resistance to that movement, and this is where it gets even more interesting because anchors do not primarily work by being really heavy objects that somebody throws onto the bottom. Weight certainly matters, but a good anchor is designed to dig into the seabed. As tension develops in the anchor line, the anchor bites into sand, mud, or another suitable bottom and transfers the forces acting on the boat into something capable of resisting them. There is an entire system involved, including the anchor, the chain or line, the angle of pull, the seabed, and the amount of line that has been let out. Apparently “throw heavy metal thing in water and hope for the best” is not the complete science of anchoring. Who knew.
And that makes Hebrews 6:19 such an incredibly good description of Christian hope, because God never promised us that becoming a Christian meant the forces acting on our lives would disappear. There are still storms. There is still grief. There is still disappointment. There are still prayers that seem to go unanswered longer than we wanted. There are still relationships that hurt, plans that collapse, people we lose, things we do not understand, and days when approximately seventeen problems apparently coordinated their schedules and decided today looked convenient. Christianity does not mean nothing will ever push against you again. An anchor would be rather unnecessary if nothing ever did.
What Hebrews promises is not the absence of forces. It gives us something capable of holding against them. And the thing Hebrews calls our anchor is hope. Not hope in the modern sense of crossing our fingers and saying, “Well, hopefully this works out,” while having absolutely no idea whether it will. The verses immediately before this talk about God's promise, God's unchanging purpose, and the fact that it is impossible for God to lie. Then comes the statement that “we have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” Biblical hope is not confidence that everything happening around me will turn out exactly the way I requested. It is confidence that God remains exactly who He says He is regardless of what is happening around me.
There is also something important about an anchored boat that I think we sometimes miss. An anchored boat still moves. Quite a bit, actually. It can rise and fall with waves. It can swing around its anchor as the wind changes direction. It can rock enough that the people aboard are wondering whether breakfast really needed to be eaten that morning. Being anchored does not mean being motionless. It means that all of that movement is happening while the boat remains secured to something that keeps it from being carried away.
I think sometimes Christians confuse those two things. We feel ourselves moving and assume our anchor must have failed. We have a difficult season and wonder why our faith isn't making us feel perfectly calm. We grieve and wonder whether we should be handling it better. We get scared and think maybe stronger Christians don't get scared. We ask God questions and worry that questions somehow mean we have stopped trusting Him. But an anchor was never designed to make the boat incapable of feeling the storm. It was designed to keep the storm from deciding where the boat ultimately ends up.
You can be grieving and still be anchored. You can be confused and still be anchored. You can be afraid and still be anchored. You can have questions you cannot answer and still be anchored. You can have moments when you feel like you are doing a fairly accurate impression of a small boat in a washing machine and still be anchored. The presence of movement does not prove the absence of an anchor. Sometimes the reason you feel the pull so strongly is precisely because something is holding you while everything else is trying to move you.
But Hebrews gives us an even stranger and more beautiful picture than an ordinary anchor. Normally an anchor goes down. Hebrews says our hope “enters into the inner place behind the curtain,” and the next verse says Jesus has gone there “as a forerunner on our behalf.” The language moves from a nautical picture to the imagery of the Most Holy Place, the presence of God. Our anchor is not ultimately buried somewhere beneath us where we cannot see it. Our hope reaches ahead of us to where Christ has already gone. In a sense, the anchor in Hebrews is thrown upward. We are down here getting tossed around by everything life can produce, while what holds us is secured somewhere beyond what we can currently see.
And maybe that is exactly why hope matters so much. An anchor disappears beneath the water. From the boat, you cannot stand there watching it grip the bottom. What you can see is the line. You can feel the tension. You can see that despite the wind pushing and the current pulling, you have not been carried away. There are times when faith feels a little like that. We cannot see everything God is doing. We cannot see the entire plan. We cannot see tomorrow, much less ten years from now. Sometimes all we can see is the storm, and storms tend to be rather obnoxious about taking up the entire view.
Yet the anchor is still there.
The goal of faith is not to become a person who never gets rocked by anything. Scripture is full of faithful people who cried, questioned, grieved, became afraid, and occasionally had absolutely no idea what God was doing. The difference was not that the storms somehow missed them. The difference was what ultimately held them.
So if life feels like it is moving underneath you, that does not necessarily mean you are drifting away from God. If you are being tossed around a little, that does not mean the anchor has failed. And if you can feel the tension between what you see happening around you and what you still believe about God, maybe that tension itself is worth noticing.
Because you only feel tension on an anchor line when something is pulling one direction and something stronger is refusing to let it go.
The waves can move you. The wind can shake you. The storm can make the ride considerably less pleasant than you would have personally selected.
But it does not get to decide where you end up.
“We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.”
The storm can keep making noise.
The Anchor is still holding.”
