Advent 2022 Day 2

 

Hope is the conviction that in the end all shall be well.

Hope is far more robust than optimism. Optimism tends to imagine that things will improve, in the direction we wish for, soon. Optimism tends towards magical thinking, that if we can only stay positive in our thinking, that will bend events as we wish them to bend. Optimists must deal with a great deal of disappointment, and gradually compromise their definition of good to accommodate those disappointments.

Hope is the conviction that in the end all shall be well. Not all shall conform to my desires, but shall somehow, beyond the limitations of my imagination, nurture room for the deepest, truest, made-holiest desire of all creation. And this hope is grounded not on our best efforts, but in the One who came into the world in vulnerability as a baby boy some two thousand years ago, and who ‘will come again to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom has no end.’ This hope is grounded in God being with and for us.

I have been listening to some of the Ukrainians who came to the northeast of England in the spring of this year, full of optimism that they would be going home soon, that six months’ welcome into the homes of strangers would be more than enough; and whose optimism has more recently run out on them. Optimism is an illusion (as is pessimism) and when our illusions are stripped away—when we are disillusioned—then hope gets to her feet, bloodied but undefeated.

All is not well, and so we know that the end has not yet come.