Hold On To Hope

This post is written to link with Five Minute Friday: write for five minutes on a one-word prompt. The prompt today is “hold.”

As the days get colder and the nights get darker, it seems, around here anyway, that the general mood is one of weariness, frustration, and apprehension about the challenging winter ahead.

Talk of restrictions and circuit breakers, loneliness and isolation, fear over rising infection numbers but also over the potential economic consequences – it’s a difficult time for everyone. And with little prospect of normality any time soon, it’s easy to lose hope.

Even the anticipation of Christmas, normally a spot of brightness in the gloom of winter, is marred by worries over whether loved ones will actually be allowed to gather to celebrate.

And yet, I’m grateful that as believers we do have hope. Not hope in a vaccine or in a quick resolution to this situation – but hope in Jesus.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Peter 1:3 NIV)

It’s a hope that is secure because it is based on what God has already accomplished, and it is a hope that in the end it will all be ok because of Jesus.

As one of my favourite movie quotes, from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, puts it:

“Everything will be all right in the end; so if it is not all right, it is not yet the end.”

The challenge is to hold on to this hope – to look beyond the current circumstances and remember that God is greater, to trust that God can work good, even in the midst of suffering, to know that the trials we face won’t last forever.

“Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.” (Hebrews 10:23 NLT)

This is what’s going to get us through.