hope

Years ago I was very good at hope. I could hope for a more celebrated position, flatter abs, or to cross the finish of Ironman. I was also good at setting goals to achieve these ends: I put my head down and knocked them off.

The elation of accomplishing these goals and garnering a little attention for my efforts was a great high, but unfortunately it did not usually last long.

As I read the headline yesterday, my heart began to pound and my throat closed up: “School Clerk In Georgia Persuaded Gunman To Lay Down Weapons.” This was a good story—ultimately a hopeful one—but all I could see was “school” and “gunman."

Those of us in violence-plagued neighborhoods look forward to winter's reprieve. Our teenagers understand Advent waiting all too well.

Here’s the thing about Jürgen Moltmann. Almost everything he says, you feel you’ve read somewhere before. Now there could be two explanations for this. One, that he’s a creature of fashion: that, like everyone, he speaks out on the environment; on the analogy between the discourse on human rights and the relation to soil, sea and sky; on justice for the oppressed; on God’s coming future. Or two, that he’s a creator of fashion.

I'm particularly eager for Advent this year. Per­haps it's because recent world events have been so relentlessly grim.

After her bleak diagnosis, Julie Anderson Love learned that hope has nothing to do
with passivity. She was, she writes, "the patient from
hell."

1 Peter says we should always be ready to give a reason for hope. Always?

The Bible is full of strange things—oil cruets and flour containers that never become empty and young bodies that are restored to life at a word from Jesus. Are we supposed to believe that these things happened? Maybe the ancient peoples did, but we moderns suffer under the curse of Bultmann’s lightbulb: we know why the light switches on. We are cursed by rationalities that prevent us from seeing the Bible as one overarching story in which our own lives play a key role.

Do not look for this mountain on a Bible map. It juts out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of God.

Perhaps the most insidious byproduct of modern apocalyptic scenarios is that grief is shoved right off the table.

I want to go from suffering to hope as quickly as possible.