By Allison Bucher
This morning, I went for a run before work, which isn’t my usual routine. I usually run in the evening when the sun is drowsy. But today, I woke up before my alarm went off, and my lungs promptly expressed their need for fresh air. Sleepily, I agreed, bundled up, and headed out the door. After jogging down the street for a few minutes, I began to notice puddles of sunlight strewn about the blacktop as the sun poked its head out from behind houses and trees. Frost-glazed grass glistened as pockets of sunshine settled in new places. Enamored by the gentleness of the morning sunlight, I slowed my pace and tried to be fully present as the world slowly awakened around me. In that moment of stillness, I was reminded that “the light is coming.”
A few weeks prior, those same four words had come to my mind, and I scrawled them down on a nearby piece of scrap paper, which I left on my nightstand and promptly forgot about. At the time, I didn’t know what, if anything, those words meant. But as I stood surrounded by the gentleness of the morning sunlight, I was suddenly certain that these words were a metaphor for hope.
I thought long and hard about the word Hope and what it means and wondered why some of us seem to be full of it, while some of us can’t quite seem to grasp it for more than a few moments. While it seems to come more naturally to some people, I believe we are inherently hopeful. I believe hope is a human preset – like when you get a new phone and certain apps are already installed for you, like messages and maps. I bet if we were to do a “factory reset” on ourselves, hope would still be there.
But in our humanness, sometimes we feel defeated. We feel downhearted. We feel hopeless. Sometimes our hope gets stuffed deep down inside of us, and sometimes we question whether it ever existed, but the truth is that it’s always there. Hope is an ember that buries itself in our souls. It waits in anticipation. And that ember is why we get fire in our bellies when we fan the flame of faith. Hope is the gentle flame that rises from the ashes of disappointment and despair. It brings light to dark places.
I think back to when I was a kid and how I was always hopeful. I heard music and hoped the ice cream truck would whirl around the corner. I heard our dogs barking and was hopeful that my dad would walk in the back door after getting off from work. I got a paper back in school and was hopeful I’d gotten a good grade. It’s usually when we get older that our hope starts to be smothered. It starts to be bullied by anxiety, fear, and doubt. But underneath it all, hope still lingers like an awkward guest at a party, quiet and observant, but still present. Most importantly, hope is still there when we fail. It picks us up, dusts off our knees, and holds us steady as we learn to walk again.
I’ve learned that as adults, many of us have traded in our rose-colored glasses for jade-colored glasses. The world doesn’t seem as shiny and new as it once did. Our once half-full glass shifts to a glass half-empty. It’s almost too easy to feel hopeless. But then again, the world is a weird place right now. It feels heavy. It feels chaotic. It feels dark. But no matter our circumstances, we can choose to have hope. We can choose to move forward with joyful anticipation despite ever-changing circumstances. We can choose to believe that God is still in control and that He will see us through.
Paul believed in the power of hope so much that he mentioned it over 35 times in the New Testament. He referred to our Holy Father as the ‘God of Hope’ in Romans 15:13, “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” He tells us to be joyful in hope in Romans 12:12: “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” And he says we are saved by hope in Romans 8:24-25, “For we are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
When Paul wrote to the Christian Church in Romans, he was imprisoned. He had an awful lot of hope for someone in a tough position. But Paul knew where to place his hope. He knew how to see the light in a dark situation.
And we have the choice today. When we find ourselves hopeless, when we find ourselves in dark times, we can have hope. We can choose to focus on the darkness around us, or we can choose to focus on the promise of the light. No matter what battles you’re facing, be encouraged today because our God is a God of Hope, and remember: The light is coming.
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