amazing hope

…having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might…

Ephesians 1:18-19

I write more reflection concerning this past year. As I meditate on this prayer of Paul’s I am encouraged for the days to come. One of the wild discoveries of 2023 for me, the gracious flip side of grief and loss, is the anchoring reality of hope in Christ. There is more hope than I ever dared to imagine there ever could be! What’s more, it is a hope that is brighter than the darkness, more sustaining than my weakness, richer than my losses, more powerful than my powerlessness, and surrounds me with the saints in my loneliness!

These are more than eloquent sentiments from Paul. In my year’s experience, I’ve come to know a kind of hope I’ve always said I believed — a confident expectation in Christ — that has been substantially and tangibly real to me. I have never been much of a mystic. I’m wary of experientialism’s damage to good theology. I have always sought to play down my experience, testing it by the clear facts of scripture. Yet in this year, as overwhelming emotion has literally floored me, driven me often to my knees begging for relief, I have known the light of true hope burning into “the eyes of my heart” (that’s a weird experiential kind of phrase, isn’t it?) just as Paul has prayed here in Ephesians. I’ve seen by faith how Jesus can heal and help my deepest wounds. Trauma that I had buried over four decades in my past resurfaced in bizarre ways but with the help of biblical counsel and care was illuminated by the gospel and was changed into the glory of His story in me. And for that I am grateful well beyond my ability to properly communicate. Hope runs deep! 

Heaven is so real in my hope. God’s power to change is so significantly personal right now. The riches of Christ are a treasure more valuable and more tangible than anything else I have ever owned or known. And all of that is what God has worked in me through disappointment, pain, anger, fear, devotion to the care of another person without holding back, and the loss of what I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined I would lose. The light of hope shines like a floodlight ahead to 2024. There are more rich spiritual experiences and great joys still ahead. With confidence, I will hope!