Hear this post as you read it, letting it sink deep into your soul:
HOPE
Let hope’s sound echo in your ears. Go on…say it. Whisper it once or twice. Feel its breeze pass from your throat to your mouth. Hear its simple certainty as you press your lips together…
Its sound hangs easy in the air. The letters form one simple syllable that rolls from the tongue listlessly expressing a desire, sometimes a wanting so deep it’s more like desperation.
I hope my marriage can make it…I hope my home is safe from the storm…I hope I raise my babies right.
Other times hope’s beautiful noise falls from our mouths mindlessly, a fleeting feeling expressed in four letters.
I hope I arrive on time…I hope my husband remembers the milk…I hope my daughter passes her test.
How we use it here on earth dilutes what it really means to our destiny as believers.
Hope, the heavenly kind, is anything but desperate or fleeting. Hope holds us close to heaven as we walk our earthly adventures preparing for residence in our eternal homes.
It possesses it’s very own voice, it embodies a life of its own. When I hear the word hope, I visualize it living and breathing as a pulsing truth settled deep in my soul, nestled neatly in a promise passed from heaven to my heart.
Hope has no boundaries because hope’s attached to heaven by God’s hand.
‘My hope is in God.’ Psalm 62:5
That’s all. GOD. And if my hope is in God, it’s in all things He has promised me! Love, forgiveness, guidance…and the list goes on.
But that list of promises where I place my hope does not include perfection. God never promised us perfection this side of heaven’s gates. Instead, He allows us to encounter imperfection during our earthly existence.
But why?
So that we clutch, rest in and run to the only real hope we’ve got. HIS hope. Because it’s in His hope where we find real soul rest, where the worries of this world matter only for how much closer they bring us to His heart and our heavenly home. It’s in our messes and imperfections where He offers us hope to grow in and through Him. And it’s in our stresses and struggles where we are reminded that real, eternal hope lies ahead and not here.
In that way, hope heals a weary soul and unburdens backs bent with the weight of this world. Hope un-breaks the broken heart and offers new life when this life seems unlivable.
‘For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.’ Romans 8: 24-25
That kind of hope, friends, is a certainty. It’s an absolute. It’s inevitable. We have hope because God gave us the gift of Jesus, His Son who willingly sacrificed His life so heaven WILL BE OUR HOME. It’s in Christ’s sacrifice and by God’s grace that we know, without a doubt, our hope is real and never ends punctuated with a question mark but rather with an eternal exclamation point.
So, yeah, whisper ‘hope’ when you wake up, when you wrestle with worldly matters and when you’re feeling listless. Say your salvation out loud because your life has been won in one word, ‘hope’. It’s my prayer that you’ll feel it’s pulse as your Father offers His promise of heavenly hope to your heart over and over all wrapped up in that one four letter word.
Father, as we walk through this week, remind us of Your living and breathing HOPE. Plant it deep in our hearts and make it ready on our tongues. So that no matter what we face, we set our sights on heavenly hope as we grow in deeper faith. Amen
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