Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. 1 Cor 13:13 (NLT)

What Hope Does – Part 2

Go to PART 1

We throw the word ‘hope' around fairly flippantly, and so sometimes it can be hard to see its strength. We say things like, “I hope it doesn’t rain on Saturday, I hope Jesse (husband) didn’t eat all the cupcakes, I hope the plumber arrives on time…”

Hope does live in those realms of possibility where the stakes aren’t terribly high and if Jesse did eat all the cupcakes, I can go and buy some more. But where you see hope come into its own is in the desperately hopeless moments of life.

GK Chesterton said, “Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”

It's that tiny spark that quickens within you when you’re in the doctor's office hearing a life-threatening prognosis.
It’s in the headmaster's office listening to the hardships of your child in class.
It’s in the phone call you received telling you you’ve been fired.
It’s in the long walk from the lawyers office after you’ve dropped off signed divorce papers.
It’s on the floor with you as you grieve.
It’s in your fists as you shake them to the heavens in anger and confusion.

It’s in the sleepless nights of worry.
It’s in the empty bank account.
It’s the voice in your heart at your child’s funeral that tells you to keep on breathing. One breath at a time.
It was in the blood that flowed from an innocent man on a cross on a hill some time ago.

Hope, like faith, deals in the realms of impossibility. And to talk about it only in terms of the weather is to diminish its very essence. Faith and hope are daring twins. And when love is present, they thrive in their growth.

The qualities of hope are eternal and divine. It engages the sacred and immutable network of connection that exists between and in everything: God. Love.

God.

That’s why “Hope anchors the soul” (Hebrews 16:9). It connects what is not measurable, what is unthinkable, unknowable, unforeseen, the not yet to the now, to what is. Hope connects our material, hard facts, broken, concrete lives to the supernatural. It’s the collision of the eternal and temporal. It’s where heaven and earth meet.

Hope doesn’t mean the absence of struggle. It’s not the red carpet of ease that many seem to walk their whole lives on. It’s gutsy. It’s incredibly resilient. It can be as small as a whisper and as giant as a mountain. In all our lives, there is struggle and mystery, which means that in all our lives, there can be faith and hope.

How do you get it? How do attain it in hopeless times? Can we buy it, can we bottle it up? Can we pray into being? Have it poured on us like oil?

Hope is not something that we can buy or get, it's a gift. The tricky part is finding it. Have you ever seen those pictures that when you stare at it long enough and in a certain way, the picture changes? That's a little what finding hope is like. You may need to adjust your vision, stay a little longer, listen a little closer… Hope is not something you find around the edges outside of your circumstance, you can’t cheat your way out of hardship by having hope. It’s found while going all the way through whatever it is you're facing. And as you walk and keep on walking, whether it be in the bright light of day, or the darkness of night, hope is everywhere begging to be found.

Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “For if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience…”

Perhaps Fr Richard Rohr puts it best,

“The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.”

Go to Part 3 – For the Love of God

[vcex_image_grid columns=”3″ pagination=”false” thumbnail_link=”custom_link” link_title_tag=”true” custom_links_target=”_blank” overlay_style=”title-category-visible” columns_gap=”5″ img_hover_style=”fade-out” image_ids=”20934,20935,20937″ custom_links=”https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1239768002?pt=118656308&ct=blog%20footer&mt=8,https://www.pktfuel.com/dailyemail,https://www.pktfuel.com/support” img_height=”350″]