Inexhaustible hope

       May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13 NIV).

      As we try to settle calmly and peacefully into a new year, it’s hard not to look back with Martyn Wendell Jones in Wheaton magazine’s Winter issue to historian Richard Hofstader’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid style in American politics.”

      Hofstader said he used “paranoid” simply because no other word adequately evoked the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy he felt.

      And New York Times columnist David Brooks didn’t appear to see much political change in his December 13, 2019 essay in which he warned of the dangers of exhaustion, which leaves people “weary, cynical, and disgusted.” Exhaustion, he said, induces a sort of pessimism, a sort of weariness of the soul.

      In 2020, this theme remains latent in American political discourse as we re-examine our concept of the word hope, and seriously consider how, as Jones put it, we can best change the tone of cultural conversations worldwide and make a genuine effort to allow our own political commitments to be interrogated by the teachings of Jesus—without exhaustion!

      Hope as it relates to health and healing is certainly at the heart of the prayers of Debi Thomas, director of children’s and family ministries in an Episcopal church in Palo Alto, California, as she prays for the recovery of her 17-year-old son from a biking accident on his way home from school (The Christian Century, November 27, 2019).

      Thomas is focusing on Bible stories that have convinced her that hope isn’t about magical results. It’s about the long haul. “Hope is robust and muscular and ferocious and long-suffering,” she writes. “Hope never gets so cynical that it can’t be surprised.”

      Thomas continues: “Hope finds and names God in the world’s most desolate places. Hope kneels on hard ground and yearns without shame. Hope ponders and meditates and ruminates. Hope gets in apathy’s face and says, ‘No. Not good enough. Try again’.”

      And Thomas and her son are doing just that—concluding that hope is a bridge, wider and sturdier that they imagined it would be, which connects them still to the God who loves them both.

      So I move forward into 2020 grateful for the insights of fellow journalists, and filled, like Thomas and her family, with the hope that shines through the Scriptures, as, for example, in Psalm 32:7:

            You are my hiding place;

                you will protect me from trouble

                    and surround me with songs of deliverance.

                                           (New International Version)