A vast crowd brought to him people who were lame, blind, crippled, those who couldn’t speak, and many others. They laid them before Jesus, and he healed them all.
Matthew 15:30 NLT
Hope, a small but important idea, has come to mean something desired, perhaps as insubstantial as a dream. However, its roots provide those who choose to be hopeful with a confidence in their future. When young, hope is something almost instinctive. Yet, as the years pile up, I find it is at times very difficult to hold on to hope. Perhaps that’s because many hopes, when defined as something desired for, have never materialised. I’m then faced with a choice over the degree to which I will exercise confidence in my future. In honesty, I often falter through fear and anxiety.
Jesus was unafraid to address those who were broken. Both the psychologically worn down, the physically sick, those blind to their future. I have seen miraculous healing, but I am convinced that healing is a much richer experience than that. It is finding something of value in God in the midst of an impossible problem. It is to discover hope in place of my hopelessness.
Someone recently wrote to me who faced the challenge of cancer, saying, “We rarely choose to suffer voluntarily (and I would not want anyone to go through what I am going through). However, the blessings we receive through the experience often would never be realised without the suffering.” I quote them for this is their honest, lived experience. They have found hope, a fullness of life when circumstances turned against them. Hope is insubstantial, and like beauty, exists in the eye of the beholder alone. Where God is my basis for hope, I need to exercise those aching muscles to discover that every life experience can become an opportunity for learning where I choose to say yes to God.
Your life experience and circumstances are unique to you. Comparing yourself unfavourably with others changes nothing. Reviewing and revising your perspective is the first step to recovering hope for today, and today is all that counts just now.
QUESTION
How high or low is your reservoir of hope at present?
PRAYER
“My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness” (Edward Mote, 1797-1874).
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