Advent week 1: Hope

I’m not really a fan of hope. I like other things better. I can lean into faith, rejoice in love, and revel in peace, but hope is hard for me. Hope requires that I acknowledge that all is not as it should be, or could be. I don’t need hope when everything is right. We don’t hope for things that already are.

I think we often mistake hope for wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is based on the strength of our desire. Hope, however, has its basis in God’s person and promises, His love and faithfulness. Hope appears where I experience God’s presence.

The problem for me, is that I want to simply understand God’s faithfulness, rather than actually experience it. I want to rely on what I know, what I believe, rather than open my heart to the experience of God, I so desperately need.

In this way, hope requires something of me. It asks me to open up the raw and aching places in my life, to grieve the reality that is not as it could/should be. Hope asks me to sit in the darkness and put my trust in His light, rather than my own. I don’t like it at all.

I want to pass over the grieving and plaster on something of my own making, I want to skip over the pain and move right to the feeling better. I want to avoid the dark places, the wounds, and the ache, not embrace them.

Advent asks us to sit quietly in the darkness, to name the wounds, the aches, and the tender spaces. To hold them up to the God of Grace and to ask Him to come, to help us.

Emmanuel, God with us.

It is a tenuous, out of control thing, to sit with the pain and the raw, and invite Him to come to us in to that place. When we ask Him to come, we give up any sense of control, and rely on His love alone.

We whisper our need, name our heart’s desire, and watch and wait to see how He will come. We have ideas and imaginations about what that might look like, but He comes in His own way and in His own time.

Like a light in the darkness or a babe in a manger, God comes to us in our need.

Hope helps us see Him, when He does.