Hoping for the Atari v. Hoping in the Someone

So it seems that we're stuck in a dilemma. On the one hand, we're hard-wired to hope. Every one of us had childhood hopes--to be a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, to get the Atari for Christmas, to live in an r.v. when you grow up, to get a ferret one day, to have your parents stay together, whatever.

And yet we're also hard-wired to avoid pain. And all of us have disappointments, things that don't work out. Enough things don't work out, we start to try to shut down the hope mechanism inside of us. We wall off, become cynical.

Cynicism is a secondary response to the primary one of pain and disappointment and sadness.

And so we're trapped in a tension. We want to hope innately, but we also don't want to hope too much. It hurts to be so vulnerable.

It seems in the Scriptures that God says a couple things about hope. First, it's good to hope. And second, that our hopes are too precious a thing to be build on fragile circumstances.

God comes to us in Christ, and he invites us find our hope in him. Not in everything turning up roses. If the content of our hopes is in our circumstances, that structure will inevitably fail. It is not strong enough to carry the weight that we're putting on it.

So God says to us: "put your hope in me." This is not a means to the ends of everything turning up the way we want. This isn't bartering to get God to give us the stuff we really want. It's the end, in and of itself.

Our hope is not meant to be loaded up in a particular alignment of events. It's given to us to build on someone: God.

My dad is the kind of guy who just gets things done. As a kid, if the toilet was broken, my math homework was too hard or there was problems in the neighborhood--if dad was around, I knew everything would be okay.

Not that he knew how to deal with everything. And not that it was always a quick and easy fix. But if he didn't know, he'd find someone else to take care of it. When he was present, I knew that eventually all would get worked out.

That's what it means to hope in someone rather than something. That's the invitation God extends to us when it comes to something as precious as our hope.

I never did get that Atari.