Everyone of every age feels hopeless sometimes. Like someone or something sucked the chocolate off our raisins. And although tasty, a raisin is just an ugly dried-up grape after all. I enjoy raisins, but like life, they鈥檙e better with chocolate.
Especially when times are tough, we all wish for better. Better things, better endings. About now, who doesn鈥檛 wish the pandemic would leave us alone and spring would come? Do you also wish, as I do, that people would stop sniping and show some gratitude for their blessings instead? (I wish too, that hot water came more quickly from our taps, and hair fell more slowly from our cat.)
Enter something more substantial than wishes. Hope. After the Preacher鈥檚 diagnoses of (first) West Nile Neurological Disease, then colon cancer, completely un-ended our lives, we named our newly purchased home 鈥淗ope House鈥� to remind us of God鈥檚 provision. We also received many decorations that served as tangible reminders to hope. Today, in a different home, we can barely walk ten steps without seeing the word. It spools out in a wire sculpture adorning a painted cross. 鈥淗ope to grace the dawn,鈥� reads a weathered trivet. HOPE, declares a fist-sized stone under a small ceramic bird.聽 鈥淗ope for tomorrow,鈥� flows in bold script inside a black wooden frame. 鈥淗ope that sustains you,鈥� whispers fine letters on the skirt of a slender angel posed beside an antique clock. And somewhere, perhaps in the cactus dish garden, I think, I keep a small hand-painted Hope pebble.
Some of those decorations came from fellow Christ-followers. People like us, who understand well the crucial role hope plays in lives hard pressed by uncontrollable circumstances. People who cling to Jesus Christ, our solid rock and eternal hope. I appreciate the nudge to remember. We鈥檙e weak some days. Satan uses those times to try to lure us into his trap of hopeless thinking.
Hope springs eternal, someone has said. Better to believe that hope springs from the God who is eternal and eternally good; who wrote hope in red letters across the cross of his son, Jesus Christ.
For followers of Jesus, hoping is not wishing or daydreaming. Our hope brings utter confidence and expectancy that what God promises in his Word will, in his good time, happen. No, it鈥檚 not playing the country record backward to regain all we鈥檝e lost.
Instead, it鈥檚 learning that in those losses, Jesus never fails. It鈥檚 realizing that the brightest stars can only be seen in the dark, and that he will never, ever, leave us, no matter how broken our lives or deep our valleys. And knowing that the best is yet to be. Not always now. Not always here. But it鈥檚 coming.
The old hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness, expresses it this way: 鈥淪trength for today, bright hope for tomorrow, all I have needed, his hand has provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.鈥�
That is our song. That is our sure hope. It can be yours too.
