Hope has always been a funny thing…
When we were kids, we hoped mom would let us have ice cream before dinner.
When we were adolescents, we hoped to get picked anything but last for the dodgeball team.
When we were teens, we hoped the other kids in our class liked us, thought we were cool.
When we were in high school, we hoped the college we wanted accepted us.
When we were adults, we hoped we got the job we wanted, that we got proposed to by new year’s, that we got to start our family by next year. The list could go on and on.
But hope hasn’t always been just trivial.
If you read between the lines of those things I just listed, you may also find these:
Hoping to find purpose.
Hoping to stop the depression.
Hoping this time we don’t get our heart broken.
Hoping for healing.
Hoping for someone to love us for who we really are.
Some things we’ve hoped for haven’t gone how we, well, hoped, and then we began to change how we feel about hope altogether.
Hope has always been a tricky thing for me.
I have loved God for almost all of my life, and I have believed deeply in His ability to do and provide. And yet I have lived a lot of my life expecting disappointment. I have operated by a “don’t get your hopes up” mantra.
Why, you may ask?
Because I was terrified of getting hurt.
Many of us have come to associate hurt and hope with one another.
We’ve called ourselves unlucky, always drawing the short straw, never getting what we hoped for.
But therein lies the issue - hope isn’t luck. It isn’t silly optimism or false realism. It is a discipline - it is confident expectation that God will.
God WILL provide. God WILL deliver. God WILL heal. God WILL be God.
No, maybe not how we expected. The delivery may come in a different package, the healing may come in heaven, not earthside, and the answers may come longer and harder than we pictured. But God does not delay, He does not fail and He has NOT forgotten you.
We spend so much time placing hope in the world - in other people, places and things. But the truth is that the only true hope can be found in Christ.
Scripture goes on and on in so many places about how hope is a gift. It is something that was freely given to us by God when He sent Jesus to bear the weight of our sin on the cross.
Hope is not something to fear, but something to cherish. Something to be excited about. The God who never failed and never will has given us a hope that is not dependent us or outside circumstances.
In the book of Lamentations, the author recounts in chapter 3 a series of unfortunate events they have suffered. They go through everything they’ve endured and that has happened to them - overall it’s a downer. But at the end of the passage we read this,
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
Other translations say…
“Yet I dare to hope…” And I resonate with this.
Hope is brave, it’s bold, and the world will try it’s best to snuff it out. But it is YOURS - and it’s all because of Jesus.
This advent season, I pray you can find that hope. Your story may have a long list of hardship and pain, but when you know and love Jesus, it will end in eternity with Him.
So get those hopes up. He is not done yet.
This week on The True North Podcast…
What do you do when hope feels risky — or even impossible — in a season where God seems silent?
In this episode, we talk about the connection between hope and quiet seasons, and why the times that feel the most still are often the places where God is doing His deepest work.
When life slows down, when answers don’t come quickly, when prayers seem to hang in the air, it’s easy to assume something is wrong. But silence doesn’t mean God has left. It doesn’t mean He forgot. And it doesn’t mean your story is stalled. Often, silence is the space where God is aligning things you can’t see yet.
In this first episode of a new series, "Advent (Unwrapped)" we explore how hope grows when we stop attaching it to evidence and start attaching it to God’s character.
We unpack what it looks like to stay rooted when you want to run, to stay expectant when everything feels still, and to stay grounded in truth when your emotions want to narrate the story for you. You’ll learn how hope actually thrives in silence because silence forces you to lean on who God is, not what you feel.
If you’re in a quiet in-between season, this episode will remind you that hope isn’t dead — it’s growing deeper roots. God is preparing things you can’t see yet, and He knows exactly how to lead you forward, right on time.
Have a great rest of your week and thanks for being here!
Love, Mykah (and Nimbus)
