This post, undoubtedly, is the hardest in this series for me to write.

Perhaps because I started this on day five of a nasty sinus infection which morphed into bronchitis and I spent my Thanksgiving holiday weekend zoned out on the couch in a blue haze rather than writing or reading or decorating or having fun with my family.  Perhaps because this is the third time this year I’ve had this crap and I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.  Perhaps because as I pick this back up, a full week later, my son is now sick again, which means history is about to repeat itself.

Perhaps it’s because I’m watching each of my daughter’s newly-found good habits begin to silently slip away one by one as the days get grayer and colder and shorter and harder for those of us with moody, intolerant, anti-extremist bodies and I’m fearful what the winter will hold for our household.

Perhaps I’m struggling because I hesitate to talk about hope when in truth I’m feeling a little bit hopeless and leery of being labeled negative or melancholy or pessimistic.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps it is because, like many, I can from time to time get sucked like rain boots into the mucky quagmire of hoping, hoping, hoping for all the wrong things.

And when that happens, as it so often does, we’re all bound to wind up with wet socks and a whole lot of cold, damp disappointment.

In a dilemma like this—when I know what the Word says and I know where I “ought” to land as a believer but my biochemistry short-circuits my best attempts at perspective-changing belief—my default, as a lover of words, is to turn to the words, themselves, to see what they reveal to me.  I like to look at them from every possible angle, examining them up close, as if I were a miner looking for a precious specimen within an otherwise worthless rock.  It’s weird. I know. But it’s what I do.

Here is what I’ve found.

Hope:

noun  A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.

verb  To want a particular thing to happen or be the case.

noun  The longing or desire for something accompanied by the belief in the possibility of its occurrence.

verb  To desire with expectation of obtainment; to expect with confidence.

There’s another word in there we’d be wise to look up, and that word is EXPECTATION.

noun  A strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.

We’re going to talk more about expectation leading right up to Christmas, but for now I want to think about hope in these terms—the desire, longing, expectation, belief for a particular thing or event to happen.

How many of you can relate to this kind of hope?

And how many of you have been repeatedly disappointed by it?

I desire for our bodies to respond “normally” to the weather.  I expect that when I undertake certain activities, they’re going to have the same positive effect on my body that they do on other’s.  I want to find a cure—not just a treatment—for whatever it is that ails me and my daughter.  I long for a day when I wake up in the morning refreshed and eager to get out of bed.  I hold out hope and belief and expectation that these things are possible.

Are they?

Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know.

I can hope and believe all I want.  I can be certain of the outcome.  I can expect things to change.

But I can’t MAKE them.

We’ll cover the struggle to determine what we can and cannot control (and how to live that out well)  after the New Year when we begin a new series, but I’ve gotta tell ya—this is where we can really mess ourselves up.  When we hang our hope on the hook of changing our circumstances, rather than our hearts.  Because this kind of hope is little more than wishing, yet we cling to it, just the same.

And when our circumstances don’t change?

We are disappointed.  Frustrated.  Angry.  Sad.  Confused.

We read that hope deferred makes the heart sick, yet turn around and read within the same book that we should rejoice in suffering, because it produces, ultimately, a hope that doesn’t ever disappoint.

HOW. IS. THIS. POSSIBLE.

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

This is where I go back to being Word Nerd Girl.  Because there is another definition of hope that is independent of wishing and independent of our circumstances and independent of our desire or ability to make things change.  They say the use is archaic—out-dated, old-fashioned, no longer in every day use.

And perhaps therein lies our problem.

Our hope is not in everyday use.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This archaic use of the term refers not to our outward-centered needing or longing or wishing or wanting but to our inward state as we are in that place of discontent and desire.  It implies that we are hoping not in certainty or assurance of outcome but without any basis for expecting fulfillment.  It is defined simply as having confidence; trust.

In what?

Well, therein lies the rub.

If we’ve already determined our hope cannot be wagered upon an outcome—a miracle pill, the cessation of symptoms, miraculous healing, startling transformation, the fulfilment of our prayers for healing, for a husband, a child, a better job, a pay increase—then to what do we attach this faith?  

Doctors?

Nutritionists?

Counselors?

The medical establishment?

Wikipedia???

*snort*

Are these not still a circuitous way of merely wishing for our wellness?

If to hope is to have confidence and to place your trust, then this becomes the million-dollar question:

Who or what do you trust?

And with what?

My church is currently in the midst of a series on Abraham and living a life of faith.  This morning’s sermon?

Genesis 22.

The call to lay his Isaac down.

Of course.

Today’s message reminded us—reminded ME, who still needs a reminder—this morning that everything in life is measured.  Including our FAITH.  But God doesn’t measure our faith by inches or by volume or by letter grade or by percentiles.  God measures our faith—in order to grow our faith—by continually asking us this one question:

Right here, right now, in this very moment—in the moment of pain, this moment of fatigue, this moment of loss, this moment of fear, this moment of desperation, this moment of doubt, this moment of suffering—will I trust and obey God and his Word regardless?

REGARDLESS.

Even if I continue to catch every virus within a five-mile radius, will I still cling to the evidence of things not seen?  Even if my daughter continues to have daily pain and fatigue, will I still be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer?  Even if I never write or speak another word and my life goes silent, will I put my hope in God, the author and finisher of my faith?  Even if go round and round the same mountain my entire life, gaining altitude in millimeters rather than miles, will I trust that hope does not put me to shame?

This is the question I must answer over and over again—the question we ALL must both ask and answer, if we are to ever live at peace with these lives we been given.  With these rebellious, renegade bodies and hearts and minds to which we have been tethered.  With these tests of faith, meant to build a muscle so quickly prone to atrophy.

We MUST ask the question, and the answer must eventually and always be YES.  It may be a tentative yes, a halting yes, an at times uncertain yes—but it must be a yes all the same.

For it is when we turn our mind back to this question over and over and over again that hoping becomes more than wishing, becomes more than desperation for our circumstances to change, becomes more than a worn out, archaic phrase, becomes part of our everyday use.

Every. Single. Day.

So let us then hold unswervingly to this hope we profess—this every day, moment by moment, no-matter-what trust in God rather than wishing to things to be different—confident in our belief that he who has promised us is faithful. 

The only hope that will not—that CANNOT—disappoint.

acceptance belief courage faith god god's love hope spiritual growth trust