Pastor's Blog: Choose Hope
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Not too long ago, a pro-life advocacy group known as Choose Life, Inc., convinced state legislatures in thirty-three states to allow their drivers to select a vanity plate with that message. You’ve surely seen them in the course of your travels. In fact, you likely wouldn’t have to travel far to see one, given how Alabama is one of the states where you can opt for a “Choose Life” vanity plate. Those who have done so see it as a way to bear witness to their belief that life is sacred and the most faithful option in every circumstance is to choose life and to work toward such ends.
I’ve wondered in recent days if it’s not time to petition state legislatures to consider another such license plate, one that would allow people to bear witness to the importance of “Choose Hope.” That’s because our present day has become so marked by distrust and despair that I fear that we’re on the verge of sliding into utter hopelessness. I actually sensed that slide a decade or so ago when the phrase of the day among young people was the languid “Whatever.” If you’ll remember that expression, it was never intended to be an expression of openness or possibility. It was instead a cynical response to what young people perceived to be just another dead end. “Whatever.”
It’s only gotten worse since those days. Hope is no longer the elusive butterfly that people are looking to capture. Hope has instead become a figment of imagination for too many, a vestige of what once may have been, but is no more and never shall be.
If I sound hopeless, I am most certainly not. On the contrary, I sense here an opening for people of faith. After all, faith and hope are kissing cousins. Hope cannot exist where faith is not already present. That doesn’t mean that people of faith have life’s complexities figured out. Truth be told, genuine faith is in a constant dialogue with doubt. But doubt does not inevitably lead to despair and skepticism doesn’t always devolve into cynicism. While my own constitution causes me to question everything, my experience with Jesus won’t allow me to throw in the towel. And so, even in the face of the most disappointing moments, I choose hope.
I invite you to join me by doing the hard work of speaking it and living it in the face of a culture that doesn’t trust government or science or big business or the media, or any number of other institutional bulwarks. Again, I get the skepticism. Each of those entities plays to some sort of market. But I don’t get the cynicism, and never will. I choose to put my hope in Jesus, who trusted his life to God and even when it was taken away on the cross, received it back on Easter Sunday morning. That’s the hope that springs eternal and the one that opens our souls to “whatever” possibility God might bring about. Without question, it is therefore in every situation the very best choice.
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God” (Psalm 42:11).