The Tenacity of Hope

Hope has been coming up around me a lot of late. In my reading, both vocational and personal, in my conversations with friends and colleagues. Hope is sometimes a difficult emotion, value or characteristic to define. From all my conversations, my favorite articulation of hope came from a screenshot I found scrolling on Instagram. It said, “People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”

Advent is our season of hope, but it isn’t a season of calm beauty and tinkling bells. It isn’t a season of easy journeys and heartwarming welcomes. The Advent season, this season where we as a church, followers of Christ begin our year, is a season that hopes for the arrival of God incarnate in a world that is burning, broken and filled with pain and sorrow. At the first Advent, hope came in the form of a baby, but that baby came into a world with the earth shattering reality that suffering will still exist, empires will continue to oppress, and innocents will be killed.

The hope we carry through the season of Advent is more tenacious than whispers and spider webs.
The hope we experience is one which bears witness to, names and honors all that has been lost, broken and forgotten in this world.
The hope we share is one born out of our laments for a seemingly godless world.
Our Advent hope is the promise that God is with us rising again for another go.

I pray that together we walk this season of Advent with fortitude and eyes wide open carrying the truth of the world’s suffering and share our tenacious hope in Christ, that can never be extinguished.

Pr. Hannah