Christmas hope when you’re stumbling in the dark!

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness, a light has dawned.” Isaiah 9:2 NIV

If I asked you to list some disappointments you’ve had to deal with this year, I’m sure you could name a few! It’s been a very challenging time, from cancelled graduations and trips, postponed weddings, lost jobs, and changed plans. Mounting disappointments are hard on our mental health as the things we hope for keep crumbling in front of our eyes. 

We like to make plans for our future, things we intend to do next week, next month or next year. Doing so gives us a feeling of control in our lives, and in usual times, we have a reasonable hope that those plans will come to fruition.  

2020 has played its own game, and we haven’t had a lot of choice in the cards that it has dealt us. It’s been hard to create plans with things changing from one moment to the next. We don’t know how to live with these unknowns, which has left us feeling out of control.

When we have no grounds for believing something good might happen, we begin to feel hopeless. We feel like we are stumbling in the dark.

In the Old Testament, we see another people stumbling in the dark. God had promised the people of Israel a Messiah, someone to deliver them from their enemies. Someone to give them hope. Prophets had come and gone promising them that a deliverer was coming. They waited. And waited.

And for over 400 years, they did not hear from God in the way of prophecies or visions. Still, the people passed on the message of hope to their children and on through the generations.

The spark of hope did not die, even as the promise lay unfulfilled for many years. 

Then, as the people kept worshipping a God they still trusted, the miracle began to unfold in a most unlikely manner.  The priest, Zechariah, a man well past his childbearing years, had a vision where an angel told him that he and his wife Elizabeth, also well past childbearing age, would have a baby!

This child, John, would grow up to be the man who would point people to the One they had been waiting for, Jesus the Messiah. Miracles of visions, where there had been silence for 400 years! Miracles of senior citizens having babies! God was beginning to set his plan of hope into action. How quickly do we dismiss the power or goodness of God when we can’t see immediate evidence of his work?

What is hope if not a trust and expectation that God will keep his word? 

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 NIV

We need to find something or Someone that we can put our hope in. A hope that will not disappoint and can’t be destroyed by raging pandemics or human whim, something not bound by time. In what or whom do you put your hope?

Christmas time is often considered a magical time, with all the lights and sparkle, snow and glitter, children’s excitement, and nostalgia. The magic might have lost some of its shine this year, but if we ponder the miracle of how the Hope of the world entered our broken universe as a tiny baby, it can reignite that hope within us.