Hope

It’s been a while since I posted anything—maybe the family news and creative juices decided to take a post-holidays holiday.  Several of you have found Maureen’s recent post.  If not, I encourage you to wander over to Maureen’s Musings and have a read.

Several weeks ago, the guys on our team started reading some excerpts from devotional literature and meeting together weekly to share our thoughts and reactions to what we are reading.  This week we’re reading some selections from Thomas Merton, a recently modern (mid-20^th century) author.  Merton writes about meditation, which is something that I don’t know much about.  The suggested activities after the writing include spending fifteen minutes a day meditating on a single theme.

Do you know how hard it is to spend fifteen minutes focused on one thing, even if it is multi-faceted?  My thoughts for the day are on “hope.”  I knew that if I didn’t write some of these thoughts down, I would lose them, and this seemed to be the most secure place to put them—at least as long as Blogger stays in business.  (Did you ever wonder what will happen to all these millions of posts when they decide eventually to hang it up, or someone else decides for them?  It’s bound to happen one day.) – Now, see what I mean about the difficulty I have focusing?

It occurred to me that my hope is always tethered to the second coming of Jesus, but even that hope is anchored in the resurrection.  My thoughts then turned the original disciples and that lonely, hopeless Sabbath they spent between the crucifixion and the resurrection.  It was only a day, but if you’ve ever been without hope, you know how long a day can be.  And the nights on either side.  Night time can be the worst.

It didn’t matter that Jesus had repeatedly told them, “I’m going to die, and on the third day rise again.”  They couldn’t grasp the first part, so the following promise didn’t sink in either.  Yet although they had lost hope, hope itself was not lost.  Beyond all hope, Jesus did rise again, did again appear to them, and did pour out his Spirit upon them.  In spite of their hopelessness, Jesus was faithful to his promise.

Jesus has told me that he is coming again.  While I think I have a little better grasp on that than the disciples did of the resurrection, my thinking and behavior often betray the fact that I don’t have a great deal more faith than they did.  How often do I think and act as if this were the final epoch, that this world is all there is?  And while I know Jesus will return, it’s hard to live in eager expectation.  And I have so many questions about what the new world will be.  What is the “new heaven” and what is the “new earth”?  Sometimes it seems this present reality will be totally replaced, at other times it seems that it will be renewed.

I gain some encouragement from the knowledge that my confusion is not as great as that of those early disciples.  Because they bore faithful witness to the resurrection, I have even more to hang my hat on than they did.  Yet sometimes my hope does grow weak.  But just like them, even though I may be tempted to lose hope, hope itself is not lost.  Just as the certainty of Jesus’ resurrection did not depend on their grasp of his promises, so the promise of his appearing does not depend on me or how strong my faith is.  For hope is rooted in God, and not in me.

And so it is when it comes to all the other things that I hope for—for my own maturity, for my family’s future, for fruitful ministry, for the strength, stability, and growth of the Watchi churches.  Even if I lose hope, hope is not lost, for hope is rooted in a faithful God, and not in my foggy vision.