Hope - 19 February 2007

In his book “The Growing up pains of Adrian Plass”, he relates a conversation with one of his fellow late night TV panellists. The guy in question, Hugo Gryn had been through the concentration camps with his father some 40 years previously.
“(My father) once saved the margarine ration for weeks, and he made a little bowl out of clay, and a wick from strands of cloth, just so he could light a candle to celebrate the festival of Hannukah. “One way or another,” he said “we are going to celebrate!”…..I thought it was a waste of margarine. I said so. Especially as the candle didn’t even light when it came to it. It just sputtered and died. But he took me on one side and said, “Understand this….You can live for quite a long time without food. You can even live without water for a day or two, but I’m telling you that you cannot live for three minutes without hope.” ”
It strikes me that hope is very important. Life is full of things that can drag us down – your loved ones die, you lose your job, your children are taking drugs… Even when these big woes don’t hit us, the every day hum-drum of life can stop us hoping. We can so easily turn to the analgesics, the painkillers – TV soaps, sport, alcohol, “retail therapy”, texting, internet surfing. Now of course not all these things in themselves are wrong, but if they are stopping us hoping then they are. To help avoid depression, it is essential we tap into things that encourage us and give us direction. We need both the big hope of God and our own hopes.
Christian Hope is about the big promises in the Bible that are yet to be fulfilled – that Jesus is coming back, the there will be restoration of all things and that when we die, we will live in heaven with God. These are things we can be sure of, because they are from God. They should give us a basic motivation for engaging with life, because we know we have a future. But maybe because they are so big and possibly so far off, they can seem intangible. Often our motivations instead come from our own hopes, which we can not be sure of, but are more personal and more immediate. Maybe we are hoping for our children to have that life changing experience of coming to know the Lord, or that we will see great numbers of our non-Christian friends to come along to a church event. Maybe we are hoping to get married, win the lottery or just have an easy life. Some of these may be of God, but may not be, and when our hopes are not fulfilled we can get down.
What are your hopes? Do you allow yourself to hope?
I would like to focus this week on some things that give us hope.