Hope

"I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit."
Romans 15:13

Hope is a precious commodity. It is not some warm and fuzzy idea about progress. Hope is not optimism. Optimism is faith in humans and human potential. Hope is rooted in someone beyond ourselves who has demonstrated that possibilities exist beyond both our abilities and our imagination. Hope is relinquishing control over life in the sense of entrusting the future to this holy one who offers us nothing more than a promise. Sometimes things look hopeless through a human perspective. But we do have hope, we believe in the birth of our Savior, we believe in His life, we believe in His resurrection and so we are prisoners of hope. What an image! We do not cling to hope, trying to manage. That is not hope at all. That is merely an attempt to control, to maintain the status quo which inevitably ends in death.
Are we willing to be taken captive by the one whose advent we anticipate, the ONE who is the HOPE of the world? Is our hope...in the Lord our God, who made heaven and earth?” (Psalm 146:5-6)