Real Mission: The Hope that is Within You
Last week we talked about worry. Where it comes from, how we feed it, and what it is good for. Long story short, it’s not good for much, save from raising your anxieties and increasing your propensity toward suffering.
This week, I want to talk with you a little bit more about the antithesis of worry…Hope. Giving up hope is easy. We all know that. But what can we learn from those who lay worry aside, and instead focus on hope? How can we join with the hopeful to see a new beginning, and future filled with the joy of believing that God will show up? There is a woman in the Gospel according to Mark that I believe is a beautiful example for us.
In Mark 5:25-34, crowds gathered around Jesus, and in their midst stood a woman who had been suffering in body and spirit for twelve years. For twelve years she bled, and for twelve years she remained hopeful that healing and wholeness would come to her someday. With hope in her heart, she sought Jesus out and drew near to him. Deep in her heart she believed that if she could just reach out and touch him, she would be made well.
Hot, sweaty, smelly people pressed against one another. Jostled and jerked, she reached out her hand, a woman on the fringes of society, touched the fringe of his cloak and immediately the bleeding ceased, dried up, stopped. Her suffering was no more.
Did she give up hope? No.
She suffered rejection, pain, and alienation. She suffered, not for weeks, but for years; but she did not give up hope. She was outcast and downtrodden, removed from the picture, and still, she did not give up hope.
As the woman is restored, Jesus feels the power, the energy, flow from him to her and without anger asks, “Who touched me? Who touched my clothes?” He could have ignored her healing, he could have berated her and yelled out to the crowd, “this woman broke the law in touching me,” but Jesus is not like that. Jesus wants to be in relationship with those who seek healing. Jesus wants to be in relationship with those who have hope.
Will you give up hope? No. Say it with me, “We will not give up hope.”
Jesus calls this woman daughter. Once shunned by society; once considered dirty, poor, powerless, and vulnerable, with a million things to worry about. She now knows herself to be a child of God. And it started with hope.
If you believe this, say with me, “We will not give up hope.”
Those without hope may laugh at our efforts for restoration, for reconciliation, but Jesus reminds us that He came that we might have life, and that we might have it abundantly.
Will you give up hope? No. Say it with me, “I will not give up hope!”
The world needs people with hope in their hearts.
Will you let fear and pain and suffering keep you from relationship with God, or will you seek and serve Christ, strive for justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human being? Will you say that all is lost? Or will you look for opportunities for newness?
Will you give up hope? No. Say it with me, “I will not give up hope!”
I know that this world is a challenging place. I live in it too. Today may be even more challenging than ever before. But I also know that God dwells in you, and that gives me hope.
Hope that life and health and peace will prevail. Hope that those on the fringes will not have too little. Hope that families will be restored. Hope that sacred sadness will result in mercy and not in revenge. Hope that ambition and desire will be bent toward justice and not toward corruption.
Even with this hope, I know too that God does not always answer our prayers in the ways that we want, and I know that prayers are not always answered in our own time. And yet, prayer and meditation on God’s holy Word is often the best way to remain connected to a God that loves us and knows what it means to suffer.
“My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his Word, is my hope.”
The Gospel will teach us many things, but what I hear from it today is: that as soon as we think something is irredeemable: be it an idea, an awareness, a movement, or a person. Just when we think something is dead, God makes it alive again!
May you never give up hope that God can, and will restore all things to health, and life, and peace. That God can and will draw all things unto God’s self. That God is near, and that we need only to reach out in order to feel his power move through us and beyond ourselves into the world.
Today, and in the days to come, may our anthem be: “We will not give up hope!”
For “All my hope on God is founded: He doth still my trust renew. Me through change and chance He guideth, Only good and only true. God unknown, He alone, calls my heart to be His own.” -Hymn 665
