Hope

This time of the year is often ‘fuzzed’ by the festivities of Christmas and New Year – we can feel a bit numb to daily life as it enters into a whirl of activity. For some of us, it highlights our losses, our failures, adds pressure, the prospect of dealing with troublesome family members looms large and it can be a bit much. 

It is often a time when we take stock of what has occurred in our lives in the past year. We usually assess our joys and sorrows, the good and the less good, in a variety of different ways.
For some, the landscape we find ourselves in can be comfortable, full of reassuring people and surroundings, the current social climate agrees with us and we feel confident in the future. For others, it can seem like the beginning of a nightmare, with times of trial ahead and dealing with things that can stretch our patience, our happiness and wellbeing. 

The diversity of human experience means that we find joy and misery in our lives – sometimes we are suffering, sometimes we are thriving. And both these states of being feed the thing that can get us through in our lives – hope. 

When we are suffering, we can often be devoid of hope – yet it is those memories of times of joy and thriving that give hope to us that better times are possible. These memories can act as a fortification to lower our heads and wade through the sticky, cloying air of suffering, waiting to come out the other end.  And when we are thriving, we have the memories of times of suffering to inspire us to extend the good times, to treasure them and turn them into joys in our hearts, a storehouse of goodness that we can turn to in darker times. 

As Christians, the hope that we find in our faith in Jesus Christ is one of those precious joys that we can draw on when things are tough.
We remember that God loves each of us beyond our understanding, like the most mumma of mumma bears – a loving, protective, caring parent that wants us to thrive and succeed. God, we remember, is FOR us, and that love burns steadily like a candle in the darkest of places.
 We remember that the tiny child that came to live amongst us humans, Jesus, is fully human AND fully God, who came to teach us, heal us and lead us into a new way of being human.
 We remember that God will reconcile all things in the fullness of time, and that all our sufferings, when all is ready, will cease as God’s kingdom comes to us.

We have a permanent hope in the love of God that stands against even the deepest of despairs, and we yearn to share that hope with those around us – a hope that includes every human being no matter who they are, what they’ve done or not done, and who they will be in the future.
MY hope is that more and more have the courage to step outside their comfort zone and find out more about that hope in the love of God – be that through church, through reading, etc.
But nothing is more powerful than, in the quiet of your own company, to open your own hope to include God. I have often suggested the prayer below, an invitation to God, to those who are open to discover more, to answer that still, small voice inside them that says, ‘What if?’
Maybe you might like to use it too over this Christmas and New Year. Once upon a time, I prayed the same prayer.

“God, I don’t know if you can hear me, or are listening to me, or are even there. What I do know is that if you are there, I want to hear from you. I know that, if you are there, you can let me know in a way that I will understand. So, I’m inviting you to do that. Maybe not right now, maybe not tomorrow, but when it’s right to let me know you are there, do it. Please let me know that you’re there for me in a way that will be real to me. Be there for me. Thank you.”

Fr Ben