It is not always easy to hope. Even if you base your hope on God’s promises, hoping is difficult. Hope requires waiting, hope requires not knowing the answers, hope demands blindness. Hope requires that we trust over and over again. It requires that we believe that God is good and that He knows what He is doing.
Hoping is not only hard but hoping hurts. It hurts because we know God’s promises and have experienced some of them but we have not experienced all of them and may not until His second coming. So we hurt while we hope.
My friend Leighton Ford describes hope as “a strong and confident trust, given by the Holy Spirit and nurtured in life experience, that God, who has promised good to us and all creation, makes good on his promises through Jesus’ coming and coming again”. Yes, God makes good on His promises and it starts with Jesus’ first coming, His birth. We then wait, we wait and hope for His coming again.
It is not easy, but God has given us hope now through Jesus’ birth and we look forward to the thrill of hope with Jesus’ second coming.
**Sit quietly again for as much time as is available to you.**
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