A thrill of hope

Photo by Max Beck on Unsplash

O Holy night! The stars are brightly shiningIt is the night of our dear Savior's birthLong lay the world in sin and error pining'Til He appeared and the soul felt its worthA thrill of hope the weary world rejoicesFor yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

(O Holy Night – one of my fav Christmas songs!)

Hope. The first week of advent we consider hope and I feel in need of the reminder of the hope we have as Christ followers, the hope we hold as image bearers and the hope that became flesh on the very first Christmas day.

It is a good time to remind myself that hope is not a feeling. It is not wishful thinking or an optimistic outlook. Hope, especially as we claim it as Christians, is a trust in what we know but cannot see at a particular moment. Advent is a time of hope as the coming saviour was anticipated by God’s people. They hoped, they knew God would fulfil his promise but had not yet seen or experienced that fulfilment. And each year at Advent we remember that hope and live in our own hope of the ultimate fulfilment of God’s promise to make all things new.

We live in the in between. The not yet. And in this time of after Jesus’ birth but before he comes again, we hope. We hope not just for the culmination of all things, for the end of days, the second coming – however we envision and believe- but we also hope for now.

I had hoped to get this blog written at the start of advent. It was a fairly unreasonable hope given my schedule and tendencies, but it was possible at the time of my hoping. This hope was not realized and was obvious fairly trivial. But we can and do hope like that, for the small things that we believe can or should be and that we want to come to pass or bring about.

But we also hope for big things. Big things we know are close to the heart of God – peace where there is war, wholeness where there is brokenness, abundance where there is scarcity, safety where there is violence. But just as we cannot know the hour or the way all things will resolve we cannot know how God will answer meet these hopes.

We do know that:

The Lord is close to the broken hearted

  And saves those who are crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18)

Our hope is to experience this in meaningful ways, to know it in our life and the lives of those around us who are broken hearted and crushed in spirit.

The darkness of the world seems overwhelming in this moment. Hope is hard to maintain sometimes. For me anyway. I maintain hope as a sheer act of will sometimes and when that fails by the grace of God only – I cling to it like a rope as I dangle over the cliff.

The word often translated as hope in our Old Testament is the Hebrew word Tikvah and it carries more meaning that we might usually associate with a more simplistic understanding of hope.

Tikvah “means expectation—and  it also means cord or rope, which comes from a root word that means to bind or to wait for or upon. Tikvah is a rope that we can hang onto when the world seems out of control or when we don't know how to make it through a difficult season in life, like the promise given to the Israelites in captivity in a foreign land. “For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope [tikvah]” (Jeremiah 29:11).” (From blog on Refugee.com)

So this advent season I am hanging onto to the hope offered by a God who broke into this world to become Emmanuel, God with us (another one of my favorite Christmas songs!). The world is out of control, but I expect the hope I hold onto to to hold me.

Photo by Walter Chávez on Unsplash