Christine
Field Personnel in Africa/Middle East
Hope is tenacious. Stubborn. Hope shows up and says, this isn’t how the story ends. It says, there’s more to life than this. Hope says, we’re not giving up.
Hope shows up in my office over and over again when women and men, parents and children say, “I want to heal. I want to face the horrors I’ve experienced.” Though the pain is unbearable, I will not let them hold me captive. Hope says, “There can be joy again, even in the darkest valleys.”
Hope is defiant. It says, “I will not let fear win. I will study for a future that seems improbable, if not impossible. I will dance and sing and swim in the ocean and sit in the sun, even as homes and lives and villages are destroyed in the next town over.”
Hope celebrates a long-awaited visa approval, joyously shared with a community of faith, even though any future remains uncertain. Hope doesn’t wait until everything is sunshine and roses to arrive. In fact, I think hope grows strongest in the darkness. It’s the glimmer of light that makes people ask, how are you able to sing in the midst of such despair.
Hope is unconventional. It makes no logical sense. But hope is born out of an undeniable lived encounter with a living God who says, “Life always comes out of death, even when resurrection seems utterly impossible, when neither our human experience nor our imagination can figure out how anything good could ever come of this.”
When we give up, give in, say it’s too much to handle, I can’t carry it anymore, hope says, “We’ll carry you. We’re in this together.”
Hope is here now. It must be. It’s the most core theological conviction of our faith. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Hope is the invitation for us to be resurrection people, to practice it, in the nitty gritty brokenness and injustice of this world.
To bear witness to a risen Christ, to the one who overcomes death and destruction and despair.
Teresa of Avila wrote, “Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours, yours are the eyes with which Christ looks compassion on this world.”
May we live like we believe it.
May we be the Easter people we claim to be.
May we live like we believe Christ is still risen.
Blessing of Hope
By Jan Richardson in The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief
So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:
hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,
hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,
hope that has breath
and a beating heart,
hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,
hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,
hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,
hope that raises us
from the dead—
not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.
Pray...Give...Go.