Healing from illness or injuries is another indication of hope at work, so we can get on with living. Many surgeons prepare patients for major surgery by listing potential risks in percentages, but always allowing a percentage for hope.
Animals also experience healing, but basically as a survival instinct. However, people have the capacity to hope, lifting us beyond mere survival to imagine new possibilities and work towards them. Such new horizons open up through studies or formal training; in launching business ventures; or by investing periods of quiet tinkering or isolation to produce innovations or ideas that can change our social, economic and scientific fabric.
Hope is far more than wishful thinking, or mind games that ignore dead ends, or ambition that exploits whatever or whoever’s in our way. Hope is a gift from God, a release of faith that is symbolised by a cross — of Jesus’s brutal, sacrificial death, and it’s powered by his resurrection.
Hope releases God’s optimism: the love that seeks everyone’s best. He invites us to step into his acceptance and forgiveness, so we may experience his presence in the challenges we face — along a timeline that outlasts even death.
Over two-and-a-half millennia ago, Israel had no access to any claim to a national identity. This was during 70 years of exile, but God’s promise to them through his prophet Jeremiah still holds: “My plans for you are for good, not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”
At the first Easter, a day that changed history, Jesus reached out past his own agony to personally reassure a thief dying alongside him that they would be together in paradise.
Caring for dying people is a painful but privileged time, for I’m inspired by the peace that their waning strength could never generate. Words are inadequate to express the quietening sense that God is present with them, preparing them for life for ever with him.
It’s a reminder that however painful their scenario may be, it’s not terminal, but transitional.
For where there’s hope, there’s life!
Noel Mitaxa
On behalf of a church near you, inviting you to explore God’s love.
