Learning To Hope

           For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God. (II Corinthians 1:20)

 

          Again, thinking about hope. As today’s passage assures us, God has made promises and He will keep them. As a friend pointed out, hope is the belief that things will get better. Technically, it’s also the belief that things won’t get worse. But as seems so often the case, it’s not as easy as asking for whatever we want and getting it.

          As I walked the dog last night after a long day at work, I thought a little about hope. One of the main thoughts that managed to surface was that hope requires that things be bad or be capable of becoming bad. You don’t generally hope that a water heater breaks, or a tire goes flat or to get fired from a job you like. In other words, hope is what you use to get through things that are not the way you want them to be. 

          I don’t think I tend to use hope to get through those things, but I should. Instead, I think I use grit and stubbornness because that’s what I learned when I was struggling with depression. It wasn’t that things would get better if I climbed that imaginary cliff to “normal.” Things wouldn’t get better. They would return to status quo. In other words, my definitions were off.

          I think my definitions may have started to change within the past ten  years. But I still need to learn about hoping and about trusting God’s promises.