A New Hope

It has been on my mind to blog for a while now, I have had many reservations about blogging for various reasons, but lately the pressure to blog has increased (of course I believe this is coming from God, because even though I want to speak, I would much rather not speak.) It being the New Year I thought this was a great time to start. If I think about this New Year, one word comes to mind, and that is Hope. It almost seems like we are given a fresh start, this is why so many of us do New Year Resolutions. This is the year, we say, we will be different, we will change, we hope. Yet every year, after a month or so..some may last a couple of months if they are lucky we slip back into our old habits, and before we know it the year is up. Of course by then we are feeling pretty discouraged and hopeless. Till the New Year comes, and we do it all over again. Hope is a very powerful thing, one of my favorite songs from “Moses Prince of Egypt” has the line “though hope is frail, its hard to kill”. Hope is what drives us forward, its what helps us get through the tough days, because as Annie loved to sing “The Sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there will be Sun.” Yet hope is a dangerous thing, because so often what we trust in fails us, this leads to discouragement, and after years and years of hoping in the wrong thing it can quickly lead us to giving up and finding ways to escape. We either completely give up on life, and just go through the motions of living, or we throw  ourselves at anything and everybody that comes along, with out thinking or caring. We may grow bitter, angry, disillusion, cynical, or we can turn a blind eye to the bad in life and just become super positive. Basically we try to cope, and this can look different for everybody. But is that any better? It seems so pointless, so empty, so hopeless. Because we know deep down that there has to be something, so we keep trudging day after day. This is the good news..we find our hope in a person, He is everywhere, He will never leave us or fail us, He never lies, He never breaks His promises, because He is God. He is Jesus Christ, he came to earth to die for us so that we would have hope. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self^d is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
Right before this passage we see why we do not lose heart, and that is because of Jesus, Paul says in verse 14 “knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presences.” Jesus promises us eternal life, free from shame, guilt, sadness, fear, He promises joy, peace, freedom, love. By focusing on Him, by remembering our life is but a shadow, it is but grass that quickly withers away. By knowing that Jesus sees all, and rewards all, we can have hope. We know that the hard times, the times people fail us all have a reason, a purpose, because God is in control. We know that in the end, God will comfort, heal and restore us. We know that God will send Jesus again to be the final judge, that no one will get away with wrong doing. This means that when life gets really hard, when we go through times of hardship, if we keep our eyes on Jesus, on things that are eternal, we will get through it. Because Jesus will be with us every step of the way, giving us the strength to go on. Jesus is our hope. It is not even two weeks into the New Year and my family and I already has had some hardship, its nothing serious compared to others but it did cause stress and anxiety. But Jesus got us through it, and He worked all things out so it would all come together. Jesus is my hope!!!!