The Basis of Hope

She told me.  Right to my face.  She suspected that cheerful, hopeful people couldn't possibly be very intelligent.  Really smart people comprehend the full ramifications of the dire straight that is the state of our universe.  And it's impossible to be very hopeful or cheerful when you're so fully informed.

I laughed.  I really did.  I couldn't help it!  Maybe I didn't try, I don't know.  It's just that this joy is irrepressible.  Which probably confirmed her point.

It really is foolishness to believe that the impossible could be possible.  To have hope when there's no hope of our circumstances changing.  When the prognosis is bleak.  When the relationship has been fragmented for years.  When we've failed repeatedly to change.

It's utterly foolish to believe that a crushed lifeless body, devoid of heartbeat for three days, could live again.  Yet it happened.  It's been historically validated and it's power is still evident in our lives.  Even death is impotent in the presence of the Spirit of the Almighty God!

We have this hope that is an anchor for our souls...

Oh, this hope we have!  It's so much more than a lackadaisical, Pollyannic good cheer.  Much more substantial than the vapor that is the power of my own positive thinking which burns away quickly in the heat of the marathon.  This hope we have is based in the resurrection.  Every promise we've been given is backed by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead!  This same power lives inside you who are called by His name.

Hebrews 6:19

The Days in Between

This day in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday...  I always think of the disciples, devastated and grieving, beyond heartbroken.

They didn't know that it had been a "good" Friday...the beginning of freedom from the chains of sin.  It just looked like the end of all their hopes and dreams.  They didn't know that in one more day their world would be turned completely right side up, that they would burst with a joy that could not be contained, that all of history would shift on its axis, that a revolution would be launched.

There's been a theme running through my posts of late about the waiting time between the promise and the fulfilment.

It's the not knowing that can become our undoing.  Not knowing when/if the waiting will ever end.

The disciples didn't know what we know...

The ability to hold on comes from remembering what we know.

While you wait...for the long hard things...when your faith is absolutely stretched...peer into the empty tomb.  Gaze at the neatly folded cloth that wrapped His head.  Breathe deeply of the sweet scents that anointed Him.  His is risen!!  Death did not and cannot prevail.  Darkness has never and will never overcome Light.

Remember the empty tomb!

The Spirit of God,

who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you.

And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead,

he will give life to your mortal bodies

by this same Spirit living within you.

Romans 8:11