My favorite activity right now is running. It gets me out to places like the one pictured above. When in-person races canceled in 2020, virtual races became the only way to compete. I have a race shirt from one of these races that says “Hope isn’t canceled.”
Love the shirt and the idea behind it. When I first got it the it was easy to grab onto the concept of hope. Everything about COVID 19 was new, and most of us hoped the drama of the pandemic would be over sooner rather than later. We banded together and lived into that hope.
Even now the future has yet to come. Though we are moving towards a semblance of normalcy it’s not what most of us would want for life. Fights over masks, having to stay socially distant, church services with only half our congregation in public, school with precautions, limited seating at our sporting events and a sense of dread every time a report comes out of a new case have frayed our on our moral. Some of us would like to let go and just get back to life, some of us are not sure how that could really happen, and all of us are tired of this stupid pandemic. Hope that this will eventually end is thinning.
If you feel that thinning you are human. If you aren’t sure what hope is supposed to look like you are in good company. Resiliency in crisis is like that. At the start of a crisis there’s a huge upswing of support (#bettertogether). But as time goes on our energy to manage life sinks. We dip down, and then up and then down again. Some days it’s easy to hold our ground, and some days we are just tired and frustrated. The question then is what happens to hope when crisis rages on?
TS Elliot writes in his poem Wait without hope
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”
This speaks to me right now. Be still. Wait. Let go. Let go of the hope you are holding onto. Let go of the way you want life to be. Let go of the expectations, and preconceived notions of life and wait. Wait, because waiting creates in us a dependency and dependency forces us to lean on Christ. Waiting teaches us to listen and allows God’s voice to speak into our lives. Waiting produces a deeper and more complete hope than we can ever manufacture on our own. It’s the type of hope that remains in place even when the world around us falls apart (Lamentations 3:21-24). It’s the type of hope that depends on the steady guidance of the Spirit, rather than the fragile promises of this world (Romans 15:13). It’s the type of hope that depends on trusting in the Lord with all our hearts (Proverbs 3:5-6). What we have right now isn’t the end of the story. We are in the middle of the story. So know that “We have this hope, as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (Hebrews 6:19) and anchor your heart in that promise because that’s a hope worth leaning into.
Word Water & Wine 