“This happened because Abraham believed in the God who brings the dead back to life and who creates new things out of nothing. Even when there was no reason for hope, Abraham kept hoping” Romans 4:17-18
“Hope is the last thing ever lost”—we’ve heard it, we have said it, we have lived it. Clinging to hope can be something wonderful and so powerful, even capable of pushing people to survival and through the most daring conditions of life, only because of the hope of getting to live the life they hoped for. Hope is really what pushes us through life, when life is not really going how we hoped for.
Irony.
Hope may be filled with irony. It may seem ironic that you would be so insistent and persistent with having hope when you lack the reasons to think that you will be successful with hoping. The irony of hope is what makes hope interesting for us and, at the same time, what can tempt us to abandon it. As much as you want to keep the hope, it can become easy for you to give up on it and unfortunately, many do end up giving up on their hope. It is much easier to give up on hope than it is to keep it.
Discouragement is easily found in life these days. We get discouraged over people, over how difficult it may be to achieve the things that we want, and over how life turned out for us. But, for many of us, as much as we struggle with maintaining our hope, this piece of element is not a feeling that we are willing to let go of.
This Advent season, I am glad to once again be reminded that I may still choose hope. Think about Israel and what they were hoping for with the Messiah, their hope was renewed when Jesus was born. He wasn’t born for them to lose hope or to have a different hope, but for them—and us— to channel our hope correctly through Him.
Sometimes our hope needs to be renewed and come to life in a new way— just as Jesus did. Today, as I start to reflect on the birth of Jesus and everything that it means for us, I am challenged to think about how my hope needs to be renewed in Him. I know that this means that my current strategy for hope will crumble, as I reaffirm and discover a new birth of hope in getting closer to Jesus.
Sometimes, we need that.
And to our current hope, we sometimes need to add another hope against our hope, as we propose ourselves to continue our faith. Abraham believed hope against hope, even thought it seemed there was no reason for hoping. He had decided to trust that the words of God were faithful and God was powerful to make them come to reality as unlikely as it seemed in the reality of his situation.
Abraham not only placed his hope in God regardless of his current status, but He also continued to renew his hope, by adding correctly channelled hope in the person of God to his current hope, as he moved forward in his journey of faith. As we think about Jesus being born to us, I hope that we can come to see that it is not the time to decide to abandon our hope, but to add hope in the person of Jesus, his words and his promises to our current hope. May our hope be renewed like that today.
