The opposite of hope is discouragement and despair, and it is so easy for these things to be the predominant factors in our lives. We are discouraged so often because we don’t see what God is doing. We are called to live by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:7), but it is very hard at times to believe in the invisible.
Naomi, in the book of Ruth, is how we so often feel when we cannot see God working, when we are waiting for His promises to be fulfilled. Naomi had travelled with her husband and two sons to Moab during a period of famine in Israel. There, she had gained two daughters-in-law, but her husband died shortly after they arrived there and within ten years, both her sons died. (Ruth 1:1-5) Now Naomi was left alone in a foreign land, a widow, and she felt very bitter. She planned to return to Israel, for she heard that the famine was over, but she was totally discouraged. When she got home and people greeted her, this was her response: “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” (Ruth 1:20-21) Naomi meant ‘pleasant’; Mara meant ‘bitter’. Naomi felt that there was nothing good left for her; she was disillusioned and hurt. We can often feel like this when it seems that our plans fall apart and we don’t understand God’s ways. We may well feel the Lord has afflicted us, that He has brought misfortune upon us, and our natural reaction is to ask God ‘why?’ Why has this illness come upon us? Why has this trial come? Why did God let this tragedy happen? When these things happen, we can be like Naomi and can allow discouragement to erode hope, but hope is actually the thing that can keep us going through those times of confusion and hurt.
Paul reminds us of this in Romans 5:1-5, urging us to glory in our sufferings because suffering produces character, and character, hope. Hope is an alert expectancy that God has not finished with us yet. The ‘now’ – with all its suffering and misunderstanding and sheer heaviness – is not the final story. Advent reminds us that what we see is not the whole story. At the beginning of December, we do not see Jesus. We see what everyone else sees around us: a world in darkness, a world struggling with poverty and injustice and fear and despair. We hear the news about Brexit and wonder what 2019 will bring. We read the news about crime and mental health issues and the NHS in crisis and we may feel bewildered. But hope reminds us that this is only part of the story.
. Isaiah prophesied during a time of doom and distress (Is 9:1), but through God’s Spirit spoke out words of hope: ‘The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.’ (Is 9:2) At Advent, we proclaim these words again by faith: that we are looking ahead to Christmas, when the Light of the World stepped from heaven to our world, when the Son of God put on human flesh and came to rescue us.
