We know that everything God made has been waiting until now in pain like a woman ready to give birth to a child.

There is something strange about us: we can look at injustice and immediately know that it should not exist. We can face death and feel that something deeply wrong has happened. Beauty moves us; we long for love to last; we desire truth, justice, peace, and a kind of goodness we rarely experience in full. Where does that dissatisfaction come from? How can a broken world awaken in us the memory of something we have never fully known?

Paul says that creation groans. He does not simply say that it is damaged; he says its pain is like the pain of childbirth. That changes everything. Some pain announces death, but other pain announces birth. Perhaps our deepest frustrations work in the same way: injustice awakens a hunger for justice, death awakens a hunger for eternity, broken love makes us imagine a love that cannot break. The wounds of this world may really become signs that this world is not yet its final version.

So, we should not dismiss too quickly the things that deeply disturb us. Some of our greatest disillusionments may be pointing toward our greatest hope. That strange feeling that things should be different may be more than naivety. It may be the echo of a promise. Perhaps we feel nostalgia for a world we have never seen because we were created for it.

By Daniel Clavijo, Bible League International staff, Colombia