Hope

We are currently in the week of Advent that asks us to hope. It seems a tough ask at the moment for a whole host of reasons. This week I have talked to seven different friends in various parts of the world, The US, the west of Canada, the east of Canada, the UK, Poland, Hungary and France and the conversations were all the same; life is hard right now. Jobs are being lost around the world, friends are getting sick, people are afraid, anxiety and depression are on the rise, the idea of thinking beyond ourselves seems lost to so many as we just struggle to get through the day.

Kaleb said to me one morning “I think I know what God is doing with Covid, he’s preparing us for something worse” and my heart broke, hope seems lost, even to the young.

As I was talking to my friend in Hungary I was moved by the conversation from a place of pain and downheartedness to a place where I could see the beauty in it all, the global connection that this brings, and how there is suddenly time to connect with people that we haven’t seen or spoken too in years. If ever we have been given a time to BE STILL and know that He is God, this is it. That is where I need to rest my hope right now, this will end, we will move back to normal and Ill have used this time of rest and stillness to allow God to use me, and to speak to me. It doesn’t take the ‘hard’ out of the situation but the reality is that we are in this, there’s no getting out of it, we have to travel the covid road together and see it through to the end so why not allow the time to look up, see God, listen to him in the stillness this Christmas and walk away from it at the end a more compassionate, more loving person than when we started because we allowed God to use us.

Hope. It’s there for the taking.

L