a Word of hope

Easter and Our Need for Hope
(A Note from Pastor Guy Sayles at First Baptist Church of Asheville)

We have a deep and pressing need for hope.

It takes hope for parents to bring a baby into the world, to hold a little one in their arms and to become, from that child’s first breath, the people most responsible for providing what that child needs and for shaping how he or she feels about the world and about God.

It takes hope to help a friend or family member who struggles with addiction—to believe, on the one hand, that he can quit drinking or drugging or excessively spending or dangerously overeating; and, on the other, to know that he can only do it meaningfully if you don’t try to do the impossible, which is to do it for him. You and he need hope that there are health and happiness on the other side of your tough love and his hard work. Otherwise, you’ll give up when it gets really challenging, and so will he, and the vicious, downward cycle will start again.

It takes hope to begin a new job in a strange place with people you don’t know—hope that, somehow, God and you, in partnership, can fashion your work into a means of growth and becoming, not just of putting-in time and earning a paycheck.

It takes hope to undergo heart bypass surgery or chemotherapy, to get out of bed and take those first painful and halting steps after knee replacement, and to return to routine after a harrowing season of depression.

It takes hope to make a new home out of a new house, to rebuild a shattered life, and to forgive, yet again, people whose ability to hurt you exceeds their capacity to understand the ways they do.

It takes hope to walk to a grave, leave a loved one’s body there, and return to the home you once shared, but where you now live alone.

We have to have hope—the feeling that there is welcome ahead of us and not rejection; a conviction that mercy will mend all our brokenness, and a confidence that grace will set-right all that we got wrong and all that went wrong.

For me, Easter is the assurance that hope lives on the other side of even the bleakest despair. It is the promise that love is stronger than fear and that life is more enduring than everything which threatens it.

meditation readings of hope

To him that waits, all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny in the darkness what he has seen in the light. ~ Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas

Give me hope in the darkness that I will see the light. ~ Mumford and Sons, "Ghosts That We Knew"

Verily, the earth shall yet become a site of recovery. And even now a new fragrance surrounds it, bringing salvation - and a new hope. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope. ~ Martin Luther

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. ~ Albert Camus

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. ~ Vaclav Havel

Hope is openness for surprise as we stand posed between the already and the not-yet. ~ Brother David Steindl-Rast

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

As long as a person breathes, he should not lose hope. ~ Talmud

(collected by anne wray at jubilee community church, given to me by a friend)