The Challenge of Hope...and the Gift of Disappointment

So the problem with most of us when it comes to hope is that we're hoping for things that are pretty perishable. The sell-by date hits and it's gone.

The struggle that many of us have when it comes to the life of faith is that God didn't come through for something that we wanted. Circumstances didn't change. We didn't get into the school or job or relationship that we wanted.

I think that God at some point in all of our lives will press us to ask this question: are we hoping in change of circumstances or are we hoping in the one who is Lord over our circumstances? Will we hope in things perishable or in things imperishable ?

We were made to hope. All of us.

And that hope-mechanism is actually way too precious to be handed over to our circumstances. And so God, in his mercy, allows things to not happen as we would wish in order that our hopes might not be rooted in something so small as the situations of our lives unfolding precisely as we would script.

That's the challenge of hope.