Secure in His Promises
Standing firm in scripture truths.
Some people discover the reliability of God's promises in the quiet seasons. Others discover them when everything else has stopped being reliable first.
Hana Kobayashi belonged firmly to the second group.
She was forty-six, a Japanese-American landscape architect based in Seattle, a woman of considered aesthetics and precise professional instincts who designed outdoor spaces that gave people somewhere to breathe. There was something slightly ironic, she would later reflect, about the fact that she spent her professional life creating places of calm and stability while her personal world was, for a significant stretch of her forties, anything but.
It had begun with the architecture firm she had co-founded with her business partner of eleven years, a man named Greg, dissolving in a dispute that was partly financial, partly philosophical, and entirely painful. They had built something genuinely good together. The unwinding of it had been costly in every dimension: financially, professionally, and in the specific way that the ending of a long working partnership carries a grief that does not get the same cultural acknowledgment as other kinds of loss but is real nonetheless.
That had been difficult enough on its own. But life, as it sometimes does, had decided not to space its challenges considerately.
Her mother, who lived alone in Sacramento, had been diagnosed with early-stage dementia the same year. Her younger sister, who lived closer to their mother and had initially said she would manage the primary caregiving, had encountered her own serious health difficulties and had needed to step back. Which meant Hana was making the five-hundred-and-forty-mile round trip to Sacramento more frequently than she could sustain without cost to everything else she was managing.
By the time her forty-sixth birthday arrived, Hana had rebuilt the business as a solo practice, was managing her mother's care from a distance, and was sleeping, on a good night, about five hours.
She was not falling apart. She was too organised and too capable for that, and both qualities had served her well. But she was, in the specific and unsentimental way of someone who does honest personal inventories, running on a foundation that had developed some significant cracks.
Her faith had been part of her life since her mid-thirties, when a colleague had invited her to a church in Capitol Hill that she had attended initially out of politeness and returned to out of something she had not expected to find there: the sense of being known, and of something true being spoken into a life that had become very good at looking managed from the outside.
She had been a steady, thoughtful Christian for over a decade. She knew her Bible with the comfortable familiarity of someone who had spent real time in it. She prayed, she gave, she served in quiet and practical ways. Her faith was genuine and it had depth.
But depth, she was discovering, was different from rootedness. And it was rootedness she needed now.
The crack that finally showed her where the foundation actually needed attention happened on a Tuesday evening in February.
She had driven back from Sacramento after a particularly hard weekend with her mother, a weekend in which her mother had been confused in ways that were new and specifically heartbreaking, calling Hana by her own mother's name, asking for people who had been gone for twenty years. Hana had held herself together through the weekend with the composure she had been holding herself together with for months. She had driven the five hours home with the radio on and her thoughts carefully managed.
She walked into her apartment, set her bag down, stood in the middle of her living room, and felt something she had not allowed herself to feel for a long time: completely without ground.
Not angry. Not despairing. Just: groundless. As if the floor beneath her life had become less solid than she had been assuming it to be, and all the things she had been placing her weight on, her competence, her capability, her ability to manage whatever arrived: none of them were, in that moment, enough.
She sat down on the floor, which seemed appropriate given how she felt, and opened her Bible without a particular destination in mind. She simply let it fall open and looked at where she had landed.
It was Joshua 21:45. A verse she could not have quoted before that evening: "Not one of all the Lord's good promises to Israel failed; every one was fulfilled."
She read it once. Then again.
Not one. Every one.
She sat with those words in the way you sit with something that has arrived with more weight than you expected.
Because the question underneath the groundlessness she had been feeling was exactly this: can something be trusted that completely? In a life that had recently demonstrated how quickly established things could dissolve, how reliable things could become unreliable, how even the people and structures you had reasonably counted on could shift or fail or simply not be there when the weight came: was there anything that held without conditions?
Not one of all the Lord's good promises failed. Every one was fulfilled.
That was not a general sentiment. It was a historical claim. Specific and verifiable and stated with the flat, undecorated confidence of a writer who had watched the keeping of promises across generations and was reporting what they had seen.
She stayed on the floor for a while longer and did something she had not done in months: she stopped managing her interior world and simply told God what it actually contained. The exhaustion. The grief about her mother. The loneliness of the previous year. The fear, which she had not quite named before, that she was building her rebuilt life on sand and did not know where the rock was.
It was a long and somewhat disorganised prayer. She suspected God had heard better-constructed ones.
But it was honest in a way her recent prayers had not been, and when she finally got up off the floor and made herself a cup of tea, something in her was different. Not resolved. Not suddenly rested or magically resourced. Just: reconnected to something solid. As if the groundlessness had found, in the telling of it, something beneath it that held.
She called her friend and spiritual mentor, a Japanese-American pastor's wife named Ruth Tanaka, the following morning. Ruth was sixty-two, graceful and direct in equal measure, and had the specific gift of people who have lived enough life to speak into the hard parts of it without flinching.
They met for coffee, and Hana told her about the floor and the verse and the prayer that had been more honest than polished. Ruth listened with her full attention, both hands around her mug, nodding occasionally in the way she had when something was resonating.
"You know what you found on that floor?" Ruth said, when Hana had finished.
Hana waited.
"The difference between knowing the promises and standing on them," Ruth said. "You have known them for years. You can quote them. You understand them theologically. But there is a difference between knowing a promise intellectually and actually placing your full weight on it. The way you place your full weight on a bridge. Not just believing the bridge can hold you in theory. Actually walking across it."
She let that sit.
"The circumstances in your life right now," Ruth continued, "they have stripped away a lot of the things you were standing on instead of the promises. That feels like loss. And it is loss. But it is also an invitation. To find out what actually holds when everything else is in motion."
Hana turned that over for days.
She began approaching her Bible differently after that. Not as a source of general wisdom or daily encouragement, though it was both of those things. As a collection of specific, binding commitments made by a God who, according to the record, had not broken one. She started identifying the promises that were directly relevant to what she was carrying and writing them in a small notebook she kept beside her bed.
Not one of all the Lord's good promises failed. Joshua 21:45.
I will never leave you nor forsake you. Hebrews 13:5.
Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 1 Peter 5:7.
My God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:19.
She did not read them as inspirational quotes. She read them as a person reads a legal document they have a right to: carefully, with the specific attention of someone who understands that what is written there is binding. These were not suggestions. They were not the hopeful sentiments of a well-meaning author. They were the stated commitments of the God who had made her and had not, in any recorded instance across the full span of human history with Him, failed to keep His word.
That reframing changed something in how she engaged with the hard days.
Because the hard days continued. Her mother's condition did not improve. The solo practice had its difficult seasons. The exhaustion visited regularly and sometimes stayed. But underneath all of it, she had found something that the circumstances could press against but could not move. Not her own competence, which had limits she had now clearly seen. Not the structures of her professional life, which could and had dissolved. Not even her own emotional resilience, which was genuine but finite.
Something older than any of that. Something that had been standing before she arrived and would be standing after every present difficulty had passed.
She redesigned a small corner of her apartment that year. She had always been intentional about spaces, about what they communicated and how they made the person inside them feel. She created a reading corner by the window, a chair and a lamp and a small table, and on the wall above it she hung a single framed piece of hand-lettered text: Not one failed.
Her colleague visited one afternoon and looked at it with curiosity. "What does that mean?" he asked.
"It is from Joshua," she said. "Not one of all the Lord's good promises failed."
He looked at it for a moment. "That is a lot of confidence in a short sentence," he said.
"Yes," she said. "That is exactly what it is."
She sat in that corner every morning, regardless of what the day ahead held. Some mornings it was peaceful and her reading felt rich and nourishing. Some mornings it was effortful and her mind was already in the next meeting or the next trip to Sacramento before she had finished the first paragraph. Some mornings she was too tired to do more than hold the open Bible in her lap and sit in the quiet and trust that showing up was sufficient.
She believed it was. She had come to believe, through the specific curriculum of a year that had stripped things back to what actually held, that God was not grading the quality of her morning quiet times. He was present in all of them. In the rich ones and the dry ones and the barely-there ones. Present and faithful and keeping, without exception, every word He had ever given.
She thought about the women and men in Scripture who had stood on the promises through seasons far harder than hers. The ones who had waited decades. The ones who had faced losses that made her difficult year look mild. The ones who had held the promises in their hands when every visible circumstance contradicted them and had kept holding.
They had not been wrong to hold on. The promises had not failed them. The record was consistent and long and available to anyone who needed to read it.
She needed to read it. She read it. And she stood on what she found there.
Security, she had learned, was not the absence of difficulty. It was not the guarantee of easy circumstances or protected outcomes or a life that stayed inside the boundaries of what you had planned. It was something available regardless of what the circumstances were doing: the fixed, unmoving fact of a God whose promises had never once failed and were not, in her life or anyone else's, about to start.
That was enough to stand on. It was more than enough.
And standing on it, she had found, made all the difference.
"Not one of all the Lord's good promises to Israel failed; every one was fulfilled." Joshua 21:45
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