Mac sat at the gate and shook with eager anticipation knowing he was just seconds away from a swim and canoe ride. My lower leg stretched out in front of him with my foot propped on the gate post to keep him from bolting.

Finally, I unlatched the gate and let it swing open wide while Mac waited for the word he longed to hear.

"Okay!"

Quickly, I moved my foot. Mac bounded down the hill and into the water to swim while I made my way down to the lake at a much slower pace.

Suddenly Mac started barking. When he yelped like he’d been attacked, I hurried to see what he had cornered. Although it looked like a floating rag mop, it was alive enough to snap at him.

Undeterred, Mac pushed the UFO (unidentified floating object) under the lip of the bank to get a good grip on it. Then he picked it up, jumped onto the bank, and dropped it next to the dock.

A closer look revealed an opossum. A sun-bleached, half-dead opossum.

I wondered if it had fallen into the lake during the night, or had gone to the water to die like many creatures do. Whatever the case, when it snapped at Mac a second time, I hooked Mac to his leash and walked him back to the house.

Opossums are vicious, and I didn’t want Mac to get bitten, but I didn’t want him to kill the opossum either.

With Mac safely inside the fence, I returned to discover that the opossum had crawled closer to the water’s edge. It lay clinging to a stick and looked up at me with shifty, mistrusting eyes like those weasel-nosed characters in the movies who are up to no good.

I walked back to the house knowing that our canoe ride had to be cancelled to let nature deal with the opossum.

The next evening as Mac and I made our way to the dock, I looked for the opossum, hoping to see it before Mac did and deal with it if I must. Once in the canoe, we motored out toward the bay where Mac caught a whiff of it. He stood on his hind legs with his feet on the bow and his nose to the wind.

I looked in the direction of Mac’s point. There in the distance, spread out on the surface, the opossum floated in a sea of hopelessness. And I thought of all the people who cling to worthless idols and false gods like the opossum had clung to the stick. They, too, will come to an end without hope and "forfeit the grace that could be theirs" (Jonah 2:8). But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Where there is life, there is still hope; and those who anchor their hope of eternal life in the living God can rest assured that the anchor holds. Firm and secure, the anchor holds so that those who believe will become heirs to the promise of eternal life.

Where have you placed your hope?