Living In Hope, Part One

With all the turmoil around us of late -- health care reform, clueless politicians, an economic crisis, unemployment, foreclosures --     I think  it would be good for us to think and pray about Hope: About living in Christian Hope  and conquering all fear.
If we look at our lived experience, our daily life, we will realize that we are living in hope all the time.  However, we rarely stop to try to separate hope out from the daily course of events to examine it. 
That's because hope cannot be easily separated out from our daily living – thanks be to God!
No one can live without hope, except angels. Angels do not live within the constraints of time;  they have no future and no past, just an eternal NOW. Angels don't grow, don’t mature into Senior Citizens .  That’s because angelic beings always possess the whole reality of their existence from the instant God creates them.
But, we human beings have a future; we are constantly moving into the future from the now, leaving behind a past.
This being the case, then, what exactly does our Christian hope do for us?

• Christian hope is like headlights on a car. When it begins to get dark, it's hard to see the road without headlights showing you the way through the gloom.
• Christian hope is like oxygen. We cannot live without it. 
• Christian hope is just like our eyes.  God has  are deliberately located our eyes  so that  they face forward -- therefore, we can see ahead of us and move forward. Christian hope keeps us looking toward the future.
• Christian hope is a vitamin for the soul. Spiritual starvation results from lost hope.
• Christian hope is the reason why we get out of bed in the morning. We would not have any motivation to work, to love, to get out of bed in the morning and live -- if we didn't have hope fanning the flame of life deep within us.

Since we are not angels, we have a future at stake. That future can be life forever with God, if we are faithful to Him.  Our trust in God and in His faithfulness toward us,  guarantees  the reality of our future, and permits us to imagine the wonders we will experience IN that future. 
God has built into us a desire for that future -- more precisely,  a hope for that future.  
You and I cannot achieve the future by our own ability.  You and I can't place our confidence in our own efforts.  We can only confidently hope that God, in Whom we trust, will give that future to us.

TO BE CONTINUED...