Considering Hope

“Keep hope alive.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that hope was a fragile thing.  And there is nothing Evil wants to do as much as kill hope that we might be overcome with despair.

Hope is one of those words that is easily misunderstood.  Often we think of it as a wish.  I hope the Red Sox win tonight.  But for the Christian, hope is far more profound that that.  As one whose hope is under siege, I needed to read The Dream of Hope in The Healing Path by Dan Allender.

“Hope is the quiet, sometimes incessant call to dream for the future.  The present moment is not enough to satisfy our souls completely; no matter how good or bad, the now leaves us hungering for more.  … Biblical hope is substantial faith regarding the future.”

Hope is not vague, but substantial.  It has weight to it, specifics.  And this is why hope can be so maddening.  It seems so far off at times, as if those desires are impossible to fulfill.

“Only the lenses of faith can put suffering into perspective.  When faith enables us to remember how God has redeemed portions of our past, our anticipation of when and how he will redeem us in the future increases.  … Gabriel Marcel defined hope as “a memory of the future.”

Hope looks past present suffering, aided by past deliverance.  Hope is sure God will come through, at some point, and deliver because he has a track record of delivering his people.  He has a track record of delivering me, so as I suffer I look ahead to when he eventually will reach down and lift me up.

We keep hope alive, in part, by reciting how God has delivered his people and us over time.  We remember, dragging those memories from the forgotten parts of our minds.  We rehearse God’s past faithfulness so we will lean on his future faithfulness rather than despair and give up.

“Hope focuses not on our circumstances, but on Christ’s coming and the redemption of our character.  .. My heart will never become any bigger than that in which or in whom I hope.  … Hope is a muscle that must be nourished and exercised daily to grow throug the normal nutrients of knowing and doing God’s will.  I wish hope progressed naturally and easily just as our body develops from infancy to adulthood.  Instead, hope grows through encounters that require us to risk, struggle, surrender and wait.”

Our bodies grow in a dynamic way- growth spurts.  My daughter has them.  She eats like a horse, needs extra sleep and the next thing we know her clothes don’t fit the same.  Hope grows in similar fashion via difficulty.  Or perhaps another way to put it is that hope matures.  Childish hopes fall away (dying can be painful) and hope is conformed more and more to a proper, biblical understanding of hope.  Our hope shifts from a great parking spot, to becoming a patient, persevering person.

“Hope is solid and sure, but only for the final outcome.  It grows only to the degree we lean into the unknown and risk the present for the sake of the future.”

This is where I find myself- needing to risk in the short term in order to fulfill my dreams long term.  It is like The Pursuit of Happyness– he risked in the present so he could fulfill his destiny in the future.  I have a sense of destiny, though different from his.  My gifting and training is different, but the next step in clouded from my view.  I could give up, thinking it takes to long to get a position in ministry (or any number of excuses may suffice).  But I have a sense that this is what I was made to do, so I must hang on until the right opportunity comes my way.

“We can’t grow in hope if we are committed to comfort.  We must set out for a city we can’t see with no promise of how our journey will progress or end on this earthly plain. … Hope is not an absence of sorrow but a refusal to allow powerlessness to silence our cry or to shake our confidence in God.

“Surrender frees us to admit our powerlessness, our emptiness, and our hunger for glory.  And it frees us to enter our frustrating, boring, and despairing moments with imagination.  We each live in the midst of what ‘is.’  Hope compels us to looke beyond what ‘is’ to what ‘will one day be,’ and that is the Day of the Lord.”

And, I might add, intrusions of that day.  There are days of deliverance that whet our appetite for the Great Day.  Because he loves us, he rescues us  in smaller ways to build our confidence in his willingness to rescue us on the Last Day.  We don’t have to despair, as though God is no earthly good to us.  We look to him in our earthly struggles confident that he’ll exalt the humble.

“Hope frees us to live for God’s purposes.  Hope frees us to serve a greater good than our own happiness or comfort.”

I hear that siren song … comfort, happiness, security.  I feel some of that tug for the LCD HD TV (among other things).  But God has a greater purpose- I am to be an agent of redemption.  I can live for the application of redemption to others, even as I participate in it myself.  So I risk, surrender, wait …. though painful, I keep hope, that dangerous thing that it is, alive.