Do any human emotions run as deep as hope?
I don't know anyone who doesn't wait with baited breath for a happy ending. The wicked witch will die in the end. The captured will find a way of escape. The broken hearted will be restored. A mother caught in a war zone holding her infant son tight against her breast, pats his head and whispers, "It'll be alright." Where does that kind of hope come from? For 9 months now I tell Ann Marie it will all work out. We have had no steady income now for 9 months. Everyhting we have is for sale, that is if it hasn't already been sold. We have been utterly dependent on God and yet with a smile on my face, I tell her it will all work out. I am hoping for a happy ending, but why? What gives me that hope?
Am I trying to live a fairy tale life? Tolken said; Fairy Tale does not deny the existence of... sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of the deliverance; it denies in the face of much evidence, if you will universal final defeat ... giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Every prophet spoke of hope in the midst of droughts, plagues, and sieges. Isaiah promises that the wounded lover will recover from His pain. "For a brief moment I abandon you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back.
But what are we to do in the meantime? Must we wait past death to get the answers we seek? The Jewish people began to ask the same questions again after the prophets had died and there was a long period of silence. "We are given no miraculous signs; no prophets are left, and none of us knows how long this will be. How long will the enemy mock you, O God?"
The bottom of page 99 says, some people find no comfort in the prophets vision of future world. "Mere pie in the sky", they say. "the church has used that line for centuries to justify slavery, oppression, and all manner of unjustice. They force feed the hope of heaven to the poor in order to keep them from demanding too much on earth." The criticism sticks because the church has abused the prophets vision. But you will never find that "pie in the sky" rationale in the prophets themselves. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah have scathing words about the need to care for the widows and orphans and aliens, and to clean up courts and religious systems. The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.
Thus far the book has shown us that today we can find some comfort from the lessons of the past. We also see that we may find some comfort in looking ahead. But like the Jews we still feel God's hiddenness as a disappointment, an aching in the heart, a doubt never fully set to rest. Still in spite of everything, through four centuries of silence, the Jews waited for a Messiah - WHY? They had no other hope.
God had asked, "What else could I do?" He then showed us that there was something else He could do. What could not be won through power, was to be won through suffering.
So I go on telling Ann Marie everyday that it's going to be alright, that it will all work out, that it will be ok, all with hope in God. WHY? Because there is no other hope. I have considered putting my hope in other things and I have not found any security that would guarantee any better life or any less warring in my mind. No, having done all I know to do, I must stand and live hope in Him my whole life long. I must contemplate His beauty and I must study at His feet. It is my only hope and in that hope lies our (Ann Marie and I) only hope. I must say that I would not want to be in this position in life with anyone else but Ann Marie. She has been faithful to the hope for 35 years as we just celebrated our anniversary. We often joke and say that she is the hope and I am the faith. Then in other situations we switch roles. I thank God for the gift of a wife that I can switch roles with.
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