[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 13/Dec/2020]
Maybe it’s that special gift that you’ve been wanting for so long. Maybe it’s the joy of giving gifts to others that excites you. For many it’s not about the gifts, but more about time off from work to relax and see family and friends – those few days when we leave all the usual chores, we slow down and put our feet up, or go for long walks, and notice perhaps for the first time in ages; how beautiful nature is, how healing it is when we let it invade our lives and our senses.
I think this year, like no other, we are more desperate than ever to be with loved ones, and to know that they are healthy and happy, and perhaps our “hope” is that next year, the vaccine will be our saviour, Covid will become a thing of the past, and Brexit will no longer be the headache that it seems to be right now!
Hope is so important, because without it, we feel ‘hopeless’, ‘without hope’. If you Google ‘hope’, you find many descriptions of the word, and how having it in our lives makes such a difference, including “to expect with confidence” and “to cherish a desire with anticipation”. Whereas ‘hopeless’ doesn’t just infer the absence of hope, but goes much deeper and is aligned with words such as despairing, despondent, desperate and sad. And when we feel like that, hope’s friend ‘cynicism’ moves in too, bringing warnings to “not get your hopes up“.
But as Christians, we do not set our hope on the hope that the world offers, which often seems fickle, fragile and uncertain. The hope we have as Christians is solid and firm, so much more than just optimism, and we only have to open our Bibles to find that hope is central to the message of the gospel. So how do we live and walk in that hope? How do we share that hope with others? I love how Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer and theologian, Henri Nouwen, described it before he went to be with the Lord:
“When we live with hope we do not get tangled up with concerns for how our wishes will be fulfilled. So, too, our prayers are not directed toward the gift but toward the One who gives it. Ultimately, it is not a question of having a wish come true but of expressing an unlimited faith in the giver of all good things … Hope is based on the premise that the other gives only what is good. Hope includes an openness by which you wait for the promise to come through, even though you never know when, where, or how this might happen.”
In other words, our hope is not in hope itself, but in the Source of that hope.
So, this Christmas, and as we go into 2021, let us be filled with hope from the Giver of all good gifts – the One who was, and is, the ultimate gift to you, to me, and to our world; Jesus Christ, OUR HOPE!
Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.
[Hebrews 10 v23]
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Contributed by Lesley Edwards; © the Author
