Hope

Occasionally a stream of connected thoughts about a particular topic will go through my head, and I’ll think, “I could write a mini-essay about this.” Or a blog post. These kinds of random, yet hopefully meaningful subjects will most likely be what this blog is about. I’ve had these thoughts about all different kinds of topics from religion to politics to sports to some amalgamation of the aforementioned. Unfortunately, the only one of these thought streams that I can remember I thought of in the past week. It happens to deal with the subject of hope, especially in the light of Christianity in our daily lives.

People live out their daily lives based on hope. Everyone wishes to someday attain their dreams of better status in life or better circumstances. I think that hope drives everyone, from the businessman working long hours, hoping to earn a promotion, to the political candidate campaigning, hoping to get elected, to the Christian living his or her life in the hope of entering heaven after death. Everyone hopes for something better in the future, and our hopes, whatever they are based on, keep us from despairing.

In my soccer game the other day, as the coach was talking to the team at halftime, he said something like, “Hope is not a viable strategy.” He was talking about our tendency in the first half to send the ball indiscriminately up the field and hope that a teammate will receive it and make a play. What he meant, obviously, was, “Be sure that your teammate is able to receive the ball and has somewhere to go with it.” In a sense, every play in soccer and all of sports is based on the hope that a teammate will be able to do something with the ball that will contribute to the team’s effort to score. But there is a huge difference between sending the ball up the field in the general direction of the goal, hoping your team will receive it, and purposefully passing to an open teammate who is making a run, hoping he can do something with the ball when he gets it. In other words, our hopes should be based on concrete ideas that give us reason to believe they will come about.   

It’s easy to lose hope. Many of our hopes disappoint us. People don’t come through for us when we need them. Events fall through. Even our dearest hopes, so obvious that we take them for granted, may come to nothing: a loved one may die, or a marriage may fall apart. But there is One that will never lose hope in us, and in turn we should never lose hope in Him. No matter how adverse our situation is, or how much we lose faith, God has promised to come through for us. Whether we lose a job, or lose a loved one, or simply feel too sinful, God’s grace and sufficiency never runs out. So, never lose hope.