Hebrews 6:13-20 talks of hope being an anchor for our soul. The reason we can have this solid anchor is because of the faithfulness of God. The God who makes promises to us is not fickle or fallible, frail or futile. We can look back at the many promises He has made (such as giving a son to Abraham and his wife, Sarah when they were old and unable to have children) and see that God’s promises are certain and unchangeable. This gives us great encouragement to hold on to God’s promises to us.

Biblical hope is more than cheerful optimism and longer-lasting than a grim-faced attitude of endurance. Sally Welch says, ‘it is a steady attitude of joyful certainty that the endgame has already been played and we are all winners.’ (‘Sharing The Easter Story,’ P 98) Instead of focussing on the times when someone has perhaps made a promise to us and then broken it, we can have hope as an anchor for our soul, keeping us tethered to God in the fiercest of storms.

What are you hoping for? Have your hopes been dashed? ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick’, we are told in Proverbs 13:12, and most of us have had many of our hopes, plans and dreams crushed in the past two years. Weddings have been postponed or taken place with only a handful of people present; holidays have been cancelled; we were perhaps unable to visit friends and family as we had hoped to do. Yet humans have a tenacious capacity for hope. Even when our hopes have been dashed time and time again, we still tend to rise up from the ashes and hope for new things!

Paul wrote to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 2:17-20, speaking of his desire to visit them again. He really hoped to be able to return to Thessalonica, but circumstances just weren’t favourable; ‘Satan blocked our way.’ For Paul, these people whom he had led to faith in Christ, were his hope, his joy, his glory and even if he never sees them again, he can have hope for their future as Christians and all that they will do and be. ‘By sharing our hopes for each other and our communities, we can plant seeds of new life, nurture them and see them grow into something beautiful,’ Sally Welch says in her book ‘Sharing The Easter Story.’ (P 94)

I believe passionately that God has good plans for our communities, that we should learn to love where we live and see the Dearne Valley area with God’s eyes. Our hopes and plans may well be dashed, but God’s hopes and plans will thrive and endure.

In Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, he speaks of ‘your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.’ (1 Thess 1:3) Endurance doesn’t always get a good press these days; it has a dour, prosaic sound to it and doesn’t seem very appealing! But the ability to endure, to persevere, to carry on is an invaluable quality, especially when it’s inspired by hope.

Inspiration sounds much more exciting and inviting to us; it reminds us of the artist, the musician, the author. But the Christian life involves combining endurance and inspiration. We can’t just afford to be inspired for a moment; every artist, musician and writer knows that those flashes of inspiration have to be fleshed out in the monotony of practice and the grind of self-discipline. So too our faith has to be lived in both the valleys and the mountain tops, in the everyday and the mundane as well as in the drama of the miraculous. Paul wrote to believers who were facing death and were not quite sure how to reconcile this with the resurrection of Jesus. He reminded them that they had hope beyond the grave, that their grief was no longer the same as it had been. (1 Thess 4-5) God’s grace is there for us in every situation, ‘there on the wedding day, there in the weeping at the graveside’, as Matt Redman says (‘Your Grace Finds Me’). We have hope beyond the grave, and therefore can endure!

Grief is a strange emotion.

It manifests itself in many ways, ranging from numbed shock and disbelief to resigned acceptance, from sobs that shake the whole body to a dull ache which can’t easily be identified, from the bittersweet memories that have us laughing one moment to weeping the next. Grief can sweep us off our feet some days as we reach out to telephone our loved ones or call to visit, only to remember with fierce regret that we can never do that again. Grief washes over us like the waves of the sea, sometimes fierce, battering, pounding us with apparently relentless, merciless energy, sometimes soft and gentle but still inexorably wet.

There are stages of grief, they tell us, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression and ultimately acceptance, but these are not linear. It can feel as though we inhabit all five at the same time. The world seems surreal. Outwardly, life continues. We eat, we sleep, we go about our daily tasks. We often look no different to others. But there are shadows in our eyes; there is a brain fog in our thinking which renders ordinary decisions almost impossible to take. It’s as if our loved one consumes all our thinking, all our energy, and so we feel lifeless and listless. Sometimes, if death has come after a period of illness, when our emotional energy has been spent caring for and visiting someone, there is physical exhaustion too, but more than anything, grief uses vast stores of emotional energy, leaving us unable to care about anything else.

The Bible offers us hope during the journey of grief, likening life itself to a journey whose destination is not on the world’s shore or borders. It speaks of death like sleep. My younger granddaughter still naps during the daytime, and her older sister frequently becomes impatient during this period, wanting to wake her sister so they can continue to play. We too experience the frustration of impatience: we may have the hope of resurrection and reunion in the future, but there are days when we would do anything to be able to wake the person now, here, in our world, and tell them our news and play with them again.

The Bible does not tell us not to grieve. It acknowledges the reality and inevitabililty of grief in a sin-cursed world. But it does shine light into the dark abyss of grief and remind us that the darkness has not, nor will not, overcome the light. (John 1:5)

As we walk this journey – often crumpled by the wayside, often dragging our heels once the manic activity of organising a funeral abates, often limping with blistered feet and aching hearts, God sustains us in ways that are deeply personal to us. For me, every time I have faced death in person, He has dropped a song into my heart which reorients me to truth. He won’t do this for everyone, but He has ways of grabbing our attention that are deeply personal to us and tailored to our needs, because He is a merciful and compassionate God. We are not alone in our grief. God is there with us, to comfort and to bless.

In 1 Corinthians 13:1-8, we see Paul writing about the importance of love. Hang on a minute, isn’t this week’s Lent theme ‘hoping’? Why, then, are we talking about love today? Well, in this chapter, Paul speaks primarily about love but also reminds us that there are three cardinal virtues: ‘faith, hope and love.’ This ‘trinity’ are inseparable, for hope ties together faith and love and keeps us going in love when perhaps we would like to give up altogether.

Hope keeps us going towards a goal. Paul said, ‘hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.’ (Rom 8:24-25) There is always an elusive quality to hope, but it is hope which keeps us moving on. Matt Redman’s song ‘Hope Is Marching On’ says:

‘Long can be the night of our struggle.
Deep can be the wounds of this life,
But hope lives on in spite of our trials
And these soon shall pass.’

The song goes on to remind us:

‘And Your love, it keeps on lifting me
And Your hope is marching on,
And Your mercy surely carries me
And Your hope is marching on.’ (‘Hope Is Marching On’, Matt Redman)

May we march on with hope in our hearts today.

Ps 33:18-22 reminds us that the Lord’s eyes are on those who fear Him and hope in His steadfast love. The whole psalm is a powerful reminder of all that God has done for us and acts as a spur to praise (going back to basics, so to speak, in looking at God’s hand in creation, for example.) These reminders act as signposts to us, reflecting back how God has always been there on hand, even during those times in our journeys when perhaps He could not easily be seen. “As we look back into the events of our past, we will see, strung out like bright waymarks, the times and places when we have been aware of God’s presence, when we have witnessed God’s saving action in the world, and when we have been reassured of His love for us.” (“Sharing The Easter Story”, P 82) These waymarks help us in the times when perhaps God’s ways and presence don’t seem so evident. Oliver Goldsmith describes hope as being like ‘the gleaming taper’s light’, and it’s true that hope does not always seem to shine particularly brightly. But its very presence enables us to keep going on life’s journey. Every signpost, every reminder of God’s help and interest in mankind, needs to be cherished as we keep moving forward towards our pilgrim’s destination.