Happy New Year! I don’t know about you, but I love fresh starts. Our local weather here in Russia seems to agree with me, because you couldn’t ask for a more beautiful couple of days. The sun is shining in a clear blue sky, and on the ground the fresh, white snow is sparkling and glistening. Everything around me speaks of hope…..hope for a great year ahead.
Hope…….It was one of our themes represented by a candle on our advent wreath over the Christmas period.
What do you think about when you think of the word Hope and as you look to the year ahead?
Perhaps we have hopes for our children; we hope they will one day ask Jesus into their hearts, we hope they will grow to be wise, godly men and women, we hope they will look back and remember a happy childhood, we hope they will develop wonderful talents and use those talents for God, we hope that they would be willing to follow Christ’s call to the ends of the earth (but at the same time we secretly hope that they will stay close and give us lots of grandbabies!)
What hopes do you have for your homeschool or your children’s education? Perhaps we hope that this year little Danny will finally be able to read a sentence of three-letter words. We hope that Bethan will stop being so grumpy and just learn to get on with her schoolwork without us constantly standing over her. We hope that Hayley will succeed with her high school maths. We hope that the new curriculum we bought will be worth the money we spent on it, or that something of what we’re teaching each day really is connecting some wires inside their heads behind those glazed eyes.
What about the future? Perhaps your family, like ours, is facing some uncertainties. We hope that things will turn out OK. We hope that God will show us clearly the way ahead. We hope that we will make wise decisions when the time comes.
In the Christmas hymn ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ one of the lines goes:
“The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
How true it is that hopes often come alongside fears; fears that what we hope for might not come true.
We know a local family that has very little hope. They seem to be stuck in a pit they just can’t get out of. With five children to feed they struggle to have enough money just to buy food, let alone nappies and clothes. Their hopes and fears centre around whether they will get sick this winter, or whether they’ll have enough money to pay the gas bill. Last winter the temperature got down to minus seven inside their bathroom. We help where we can, but it’s hard to see how they can get out of this pit. It’s hard to know how to pray away the despair we see in their eyes. The hard thing is that they are believers and yet they feel that God has deserted them.
God impressed it on my heart to pray diligently for this family, especially the wife, and also to share Scriptures with her. We had recently enjoyed doing Ann Voskamp’s thanksgiving tree as a family, and I really wanted to share with her how Ann’s book ‘One Thousand Gifts’ had really helped me in the bleak days following my miscarriage in 2011. Unfortunately Ann’s book wasn’t available in Russian at the Christian bookstore in town, so instead I bought a pretty journal and copied out all the Thanksgiving scriptures onto some of the pages. I handed the book to my friend and asked her if she’d like to try writing down one thing to be thankful for each day. She seemed grateful and willing.
I don't know if my friend will keep it up or not, but writing down all those scripture verses was a powerful experience for me. God’s word really is living and active! When hope is lacking in our lives, God’s word can lift our eyes up out of our circumstances and into His loving face, which reassures us that He has everything in control and we do not need to fear.
Where is hope? It’s in the form of a tiny, helpless baby who was born over 2,000 years ago in an obscure town in the Middle East. It is because that baby was born that we can be sure that God has a plan to put everything right, and He’s working that plan out today. We may not see immediate results, but He asks us to TRUST Him. He asks us to leave our despair at the foot of the manger, to look into the sweet face of the divine baby - God incarnate - and allow Him to fill our hearts with hope.
"..that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.." Ephesians 1v18b
These are my prayers for you for this coming year. May God fill your hearts with his Hope as you look to what lies ahead.
"Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful." Hebrews 10v23
Abide in Him!
Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net/ Stuart Miles
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