HOPE

1st week of 4 leading up to Christmas. i'm thinking alot about the word HOPE.

What got me started was the book VELVET ELVIS, Rob Bell. Great book by the way. Well the final chapter is DIFFICULTY, SUFFERING, AND HOPE. I just can't seem to shake these thoughts on hope. Hope is a word used loosly at christmas time,..faith hope and love... I tried to think of times when i've really experienced hope... not the moment when your thinking oh man i really hope "fill in blank" is the outcome. Hope is the feeling i get after i've been unexpectedly encouraged, loved, or delighted. not once i'm looking back on it, but right there in the moment.

Rob Bell talks of it as, "the kind of hope that comes from staring pain and suffering right in the eyes and refusing to believe that this is all there is." so at christmas time how do we give this gift of hope?

mom and dad made it home to Maine, late at night they arrived, but who greeted them with a late night visit? Their grandkids! Dan didn't wait to come see them the next day, after school.. but right then! I wonder what feelings they felt? and how they might discribe them? Dan did the same thing to me when i was moving to alaska, he drove to our house unexpectedly at 3:30am to drive with us to the airport, it was just what i needed to know he supported me in moving a million miles away and I knew his love for me was deep enough to stay just the same, no matter what. Hope. that things will work out, you can see things in a different light, change is possible, one of our favorite sayings...stranger things have happened...

how i feel when i here from friends and family dispite really tough situations, God is Good, there for life is good. Could it be Hope was brought to them in order for them to be able to share this? and for it to be possible? Rob Bell said "It is in the flow of real life, in the places we live and ove with the people we're on the journey with, that we are reminded it is God's world and we're goingto be okay.

PSALMS 131:3 O people of God, hope in the Lord. Hope now. Hope always.