Scripture: Jeremiah 29:10-13
As I write this, it is November 5th, 2023. It has been exactly 13 months today since the sudden death of my husband John and a little over 3 months since losing my dad. It would have probably been impossible for me to write about hope this time last year, and to be honest it is still difficult. There is a war raging in Gaza and Ukraine, and more recent gun violence in our country.
Hope is hard these days. When life as we know it abruptly changes and we find ourselves facing a future that is uncertain and not at all what we planned, it takes a while just to get our balance under our feet, enough to deal with the tasks of the present. Hope, however, asks more of us and points toward the future. In the words of the hymn Great is thy Faithfulness we hear “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow”.
Many days I am just hoping for that strength for today. Certainly “bright hope” for tomorrow seems a long way off. Hope also implies optimism. We are hoping for something good to happen, for circumstances to improve in the future. When present circumstances are difficult, sad and even bleak, thoughts about the future are especially hard, making hope and its partner, optimism, elusive.
I have learned however, that circumstances do not need to change first or improve for us to have hope, and they often don’t. We don’t have to wait until the tears have dried up because they won’t completely, but instead we just must claim that promise from God, that He is with us. No matter what, Emmanuel, God is with us! Just because we cannot see the sun at night, we trust it is there and it proves itself to us every morning. God is the same. He is constant and always with us, even when it is a hard, dark night, He will see us through to the morning and it is Him that gives us that sunlight. It is like our phone we place on its charger. When morning dawns and brings its warmth and energy, and if we open ourselves to experience God’s presence with us during the day, that presence charges our battery, charges our hope bank. It sustains us when we are low and when our ability to see or feel that hope wanes.
In the gospel of John, when Mary goes to the tomb and finds her friend and teacher gone, likely thinking in that moment that all hope was also gone, what she instead finds is that He is there with her, resurrected, reassuring her, and restoring her hope. (John Ch.20). At the end of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells the disciples, “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20). This is the hope we celebrate at Easter. Let’s also celebrate it at Christmas and every day because that is truly what will sustain us.
Barri Payne is a mother to college freshman Amelia (how did that happen?), cat mom of 3, and family law attorney.