Hope When Needed.

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“Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.”  
Psalm 62:5. New International Version

Each year at about this time of winter in the cloudy, rainy Pacific Northwest, I long for signs of spring.  Pitchers and catchers reporting to ‘Spring Camp’ is one of those signs.  That was last week Wednesday and on a very rainy day in Seattle, I was hopeful that Spring is not too far distant.

In his poem An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope penned some very familiar lines:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blessed:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Those seem like bleak words, if they are true.  I don’t think they are true.  Our hope in Christ is for today, for the here and now – regardless of what season of the year it is, and how I am feeling in any particular moment.  My hope in Christ is not just for heaven, but also for life now on earth.  We are blessed today, in this moment of time and space and place.  God is with us.  God is for us.  God gives us rest.

Hope remembers the faithfulness of the Lord.  Hope remembers the Lord’s work of salvation.  Hope remembers the past and future in the present moment, trusting the Lord to be faithful now, just as he always has been.  Hope is faith busy at work, trusting and seeing through Christ’s love for us.

Hope does in fact spring eternal, because it springs from the eternal, ever-deep wells of God’s own grace.  To rest in God is to hope in the promise of his presence, in the breath of life of his Spirit, in the tender mercy of his Christ.  To hope in God is to trust these things, to claim them by faith as true today, and to live in God’s own memory of his love for us.

Hope—it’s a sign of the times.

Text and picture, copyright Don Schatz