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Advent Meditation - Day Twelve - Hope

Remember five or six years ago when Asian-inspired tattoos were all the rage among suburban white kids? I totally bought into it. Shortly after my 18th birthday, I decided I wanted a tattoo that meant "hope." I found a character defined as "hope, thought, or desire" in an online Kanji dictionary, printed it out, took it to the parlor that my dad's friend on the board of health recommended as the cleanest in the county, pointed to the spot on my ankle where I wanted it to be, and got inked.

The novelty wore off pretty quickly. I liked how the tattoo looked, and I was glad to be reminded of the meaning when I thought about it, but after it didn't hurt anymore, it rarely crossed my mind.

When I moved to San Francisco two years ago, I ended up at the doctor with a bad cold. He noticed my tattoo and asked if I knew what it meant. I told him what the Kanji dictionary I picked it from said it meant, and he said that, more specifically, it means to hope for something when it isn't there or when you can't see it -- almost more like longing.

Aren't the most crucial times to have hope the times when you're longing for something that you can't see, something that feels like it isn't there? Even though I know that God is always there, I have moments when I lose hope in that unseen presence. Whether I am lonely and scared or just empty and uninspired, sometimes the feeling that God isn't tangibly there gets me down, and I long for Him to comfort me, fill me, inspire me, in a real and visible way.

To me, hope is staying focused on what is ahead, even when it feels like what you're hoping for isn't there, even when you can't imagine what's going to come next. This advent season, I'm trying to focus on keeping up hope for the plans God has for my life -- even though I don't know exactly what they are, even though they have not yet come to fruition, and even though I can't picture what they're going to be like when they do.

When I look at my tattoo now, I think about where I was when I got it and where God has brought me since then. And that's enough to keep me hoping.

Hebrews 11:1

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

today's meditation was written by Megan Dunchak.

Advent Meditation - Day Eleven - Hope

In the novel Memoirs of a Geisha, one of the characters describes another character as having a lot of “water” in her personality. “Water never waits,” she says, “It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about.” That is how I think of hope: as a subtle force that operates behind all of our planning, driving us constantly forward in expected and unexpected ways.

Which is to say that I take hope for granted, because it is always there, always integrated into the flow of my life. The only thing I am aware of actively hoping for is salvation. It might sound strange for someone who considers herself a Christian to say she hopes for salvation, but for almost as long as I can remember, I have struggled to understand salvation as the one-time event it is often described as in our culture and even in the Bible. I never trust things that only happen once, because in hindsight I always question whether they really happened. I am a person who wonders “Was that really an earthquake?” or “Did I definitely turn off the stove, even though I checked three times?” So, naturally I take great comfort in the verses that describe salvation as a process or reference our “hope of salvation” – as if it has not yet been completed, as if I have many opportunities to confirm that it is really happening. When I feel overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what salvation might look like in my life, I am much more aware of the force of hope and the fact that it is largely outside of my control, finding paths I wouldn’t find and gathering momentum I couldn’t gather on my own.

To take that momentum, and put it into action, I rely on the advice of the author of Hebrews. From Hebrews 6:

9Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case—things that accompany salvation. 10God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. 11We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. 12We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

today's meditation was written by Lisa Rode.

you can sign up for the daily Advent meditation by sending an e-mail to advent2007-subscribe@missionbaycc.org