The thing that started it all--thoughts on Hope

Hope

            Yesterday, we read some verses from Isaiah, Chapter 40.  As I was looking for the right verses, verse 6 caught my eye:

“A voice says, “Cry out.” 

And I said, “What shall I cry?”

            Later, I started thinking about hope, and here is what I came up with.

            People talk about hope like it’s some light and fluffy happy emotion.  But I’m coming to realize that it’s not.  It’s deep and it’s dark and it’s exhausting and sometimes it’s painful.

            Hope is only one step from despair, and the opposite of hope is despondency—giving up, like Jonah did after Ninevah.. You want to just sit under a dead tree and do nothing and wait to die.

            Hope is not a kid hoping he gets his favorite video game for Christmas.  Hope is writing a check to pay rent and then having to take cash out to put gas in the car so you can get to work, and hoping that somehow you get the money to cover that check before it bounces.

            It occurred to me that might be how the Israelites felt waiting to be led out of Egypt, and I felt a kinship with those who wandered in the desert for so long, with the waiting and the uncertainty.  I thought of Aaron and the golden calf and I thought well, it’s easier for people when they have someone or something to blame.  Moses was off on a mountain and God was invisible.  ‘Fine’ Aaron most have thought, ‘I’ll give them something to focus on.  It will take the pressure off God and Moses.’  We do the same thing, only we blame the economy or a politician.  We forget that only god can see the end of the journey.  I may never see God’s plan for me fulfilled.  His purpose for bringing me here might be for my daughter, or even my daughter’s daughter.

            It would be so easy to give up and just sit and wait for the power to be turned off and the landlord to shove an eviction notice under the door.  But in the end, every time I decide ‘I’m giving up’, I find a five dollar bill on the sidewalk, or a check comes in the mail, or I get a call about a possible job, and I take a deep breath and I get up and I keep going.  And sometimes that hope feels like the heaviest burden imaginable.

            So, our hope is in God, but what does that hope feel like?  In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks about the resurrection, and in verse 19, ‘If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.’  If there was no resurrection, then we are wasting our time trying to live according to the Bible.  We might as well lie and steal and cheat, because there is no hope without Jesus dying on the cross to atone for our sins. 

            Our hope in God should be deep and strong and it should feel like work.  The easy thing is to live as the world suggests, be dishonest and steal if you need money.  Lie to get the job you want. Chase that person who isn’t your spouse because if there is no God, there is no Heaven, and then there is nothing to hope for.

            Hope, like Faith and Love has a human definition and a godly definition.  God’s meanings always include action.  So Hope is not just a word, it’s a way of living.

            I don’t know what it is that keeps me from giving up. (Though I know there are many worse off than I).  But there is always something.  And it must come from God, because it sure isn’t coming from me.