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Reflections on Hope
Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11
by Faith Marsalli, December 15, 2002

Isaiah bring to us words of hope and comfort. His message is filled with good news for the oppressed and the broken hearted. His words of promise remind us that there is comfort for those who mourn, that there will eventually be a time of rebuilding the things which have been destroyed, and that there is always the possibility of new growth. Isaiah beautifully describes for us the goodness of God’s character. What is it like for you and me to hear these consoling words when we are suffering, or see the suffering of others around us? It is very difficult to fully understand all that happens in our lives. We simply don’t have the eyes to see the whole picture. We lack the advantage of God’s perspective.

The prophet Isaiah’s words give me a profound sense of hope. And hope in the ultimate goodness of God is what keeps my faith alive. In life’s perplexing circumstances, our only hope is to cling to the unchanging loving nature of God.

I spent some time with a friend this past week and in the course of our visit he asked me, “How does one experience God’s love? I don’t have any comprehension of what this means. It’s as if you were speaking to me in a foreign language.” I shared from my own personal experience, the amazing ways in which I have known and continue to discover God’s love for me. I tried to help him identify ways in which God was loving him, too. He said he had never thought of these experiences in his life to be an expression of God’s love for him. I think it stunned him to think God could touch his life in such a personal way. I reckon I offered to him a sense of hope that God isn’t as abstract as he thought. I think we need to often be reminded of our own inability to see things from a Divine perspective. There is a passage in Deuteronomy that says,

“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever.”

This has been a very sad week in the life of our meeting, as we even still, are trying to comprehend the death of little Christian Crowell. I know I have profoundly felt the limits of my own strength and insight. I have searched within my own heart for understanding. All I can do is cling to the hope and promise that God cannot and will not abandon his children---that what is hidden from me now, I don’t need to know right now, but the one thing I do know is that God is faithful and present even when I don’t understand. This truth belongs to me--it is mine.

I recently have been reading Howard Thurman and I’ll close my thoughts this morning with one of his reflections. He gently reminds me where my hope and strength truly rest.

The Experience of Growing Up

Always the experience of growing up teaches the same lesson: The hard way of self-reliance--the uneasy tensions of self-confidence. What there is to be done in accordance with the persistent desire, each must do for himself. Often by trial and error, by fumblings and blunderings, here a little, there a little more, step by uncertain step we move in the direction of self-awareness: Gathering unto ourselves personal flavor, a tang of uniqueness. In this strength of intimate disclosure, each person faces his world, does battle with nameless forces, conquers and is defeated, wins or loses, waxes strong or weak. Always experience says, “Rely on your own strength, hold fast to your own resources, desert not your own mind.” In the same sure moment, the same voice whispers, “Upon your own strength, upon your own resource, upon your own mind, at long last you cannot not rely. Your own strength is weakness, your own mind is shallow, your own spirit is feeble.”

The paradox: All experience strips us of much except our sheer strength of mind, of spirit. All experience reveals that upon these we must not finally depend. Brooding over us and about us, even in the shadows of the paradox, there is something more-- there is strength beyond our strength, giving strength to our strength. Whether we bow our knee before an altar or spend our days in the delusions of our significance, the unalterable picture remains the same; sometimes in the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper in the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.

Faith Marsalli, December 15, 2002