hope -
- hope -
Crooners are singing,
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year…..”
… But what if you’ve lost hope? Or it’s slowly seeping?
What you’ve waited for has not shown up.
Who you counted on failed you.
Promises made were not kept.
If the ache of unmet longing has left your heart heavy and dragging…
then this may be the most painful time of the year for you.
“But hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Proverbs 13:12
In the Hebrew, “Deferred” means to prolong, delay, draw out, to drag,
and “Sick” means worn, rubbed, weak and weary.
When hope is delayed a heart can be worn weary in the waiting.
Thin from the rub of real life, a heart can lose it’s capacity to hold on to things that have not yet come. Hope seems to leak out from every split and tear.
And then, Christmas comes, reminding us that a babe came 2000 years ago to reconcile the rips we feel, the relationship torn asunder. The one between us and HOPE. Because more than ‘hope’ being something we do, Hope is WHO we fasten our expectations on to.
Christmas is Hope coming to heal.
Christmas is Hope arriving on the shattered scene of our discouragement and gently cupping our face, turning it towards Him and saying,
“Yes! You can hope again! You can believe in the unbelievable. You can expect My best. You can trust in My goodness. I AM HOPE. Set all your hopes on Me! I came for this reason. To give you SomeOne to hope in, Someone Who IS Hope itself.”
“… But when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.”(The rest of Proverbs 13:12)
If we saw that “desire coming”, is Jesus coming, would the leaking stop?
From the tree of Life in the garden, to a tree carved into a manger-bed, to a tree of cruel death so that we could eat from the Tree of Life forever - the true hope we have is to be reunited with Hope, forever!
