From Sunday, August 30, 2026.

They Are Not Imagining It

The word for Sunday, August 30, 2026 is They Are Not Imagining It.

The anchor verses are Hebrews 11:13 and Hebrews 11:16.

In 1986, two thousand eight hundred people went out on the Texas Gulf coast and picked up trash off the beach.

That was the first one. Forty years later, the International Coastal Cleanup reaches around the world each September, centered on the third Saturday of the month.

This week the organization that runs it released the numbers from last year's cleanup.

In a single day, more than six hundred thirty thousand volunteers pulled one million three hundred thirty eight thousand seven hundred and twelve plastic bottles out of beaches and waterways. Eight hundred eighty five thousand bottle caps. Almost two million cigarette butts. Close to fourteen million pieces of trash in all, from more than fifteen thousand miles of coastline and waterways.

In one day.

One sentence from the coverage names what years of that work can feel like.

People who feel like they are picking up the same trash, year after year, are not imagining it.

Forty years of this. Nearly twenty million volunteers over that time. More than four hundred million pounds hauled off.

And the single most common item last year was a plastic bottle.

Nobody on that Texas beach in 1986 could have expected one cleanup to finish the ocean. Forty years later, the work is still waiting. Whatever was removed that morning did not keep the next bottle from arriving.

More than six hundred thirty thousand people went out again anyway.

In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, after naming Abraham and Sarah, the writer says something that does not sound much like a success story.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

They died not having received the promises.

Abraham never saw the nation. Sarah had Isaac, but she did not see the multitude she had been promised. Isaac and Jacob lived as heirs, still waiting. The chapter keeps going through Moses and people who were tortured, driven out, and made to live in caves.

They received real things along the way. None of them held the whole promise in their hands.

What Hebrews says is that they saw it from a distance and greeted it, the way you would wave at somebody across a field you cannot cross.

That is what faith looked like for the people the Bible holds up as examples.

Three verses later, Hebrews gives you this.

Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.

GOD is not ashamed of them. The ones who died waiting, whose work was interrupted, and who never held the whole result in their hands are still named as people of faith.

HE is not ashamed to attach HIS name to theirs.

And the verse gives the reason. HE has prepared for them a city.

GOD prepared something they did not reach in their lifetimes. The promise did not fail because they died before completion. The city did not depend on their ability to finish the journey under their own power.

That is the difference between GOD and a scoreboard. A scoreboard records what you completed. Hebrews remembers people whose faithful work was still unfinished when their lives ended.

We like the ribbon cutting. We like the last payment, the healed relationship, the finished building, the prayer with an answer we can point to. Hebrews gives us people who kept walking without that kind of ending. Their lives closed before the promise did.

You may be somewhere in a piece of work that will outlast you.

Raising somebody who will not understand it for twenty years. Sitting with a parent who no longer knows who you are. Praying about a person who has not moved an inch. Doing something for a community that will need it done again next year and the year after.

There is a version of faith that measures itself by completion, and Hebrews 11 will not let us keep it.

The people on that list are not there because they finished everything. They kept facing the right direction while much of the promise stayed out of reach.

They trusted the One who held what they could not finish.

The cleanup is not the promise in Hebrews. It is a picture of what unfinished work feels like. You bend down. You pick up what is in front of you. Tomorrow something else may wash ashore.

They are not imagining it. They went anyway.

Faithfulness can look like that. Do the work in front of you. Leave completion with GOD.

That is where today's Sabbath goes next. What belongs on your desk, and what never did.

I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.

• 🙏 To the one whose work keeps coming undone.
• 🙏 To the one who will not live to see the thing you are praying for.
• 🙏 To the one who has been made to feel that unfinished means failed.
• 🙏 To the one waving at something across a field you cannot cross.

Grace and Peace.