Advent time: what time is this?

This is the second Sunday of the four week version of the Christian season of Advent, the season of waiting in joyful hope for more light and for Light Incarnate. 

As always, I wonder how this feels if one lives in the southern hemisphere; when we worked in South Africa, our friends described this as a time to go the beach ...

For this day, in the North American bit of the world, I'll share this musing from historian, Jemar Tisby, who cannot resist preaching alongside teaching the story of this country.

How Can We Talk of Hope?

In the context of the news going from bad to worse, speaking of hope seems foolish.

Hope has become another 4-letter word—something forbidden and distasteful.

Hope seems out of style, hokey, detached from reality, blindly optimistic, historically uninformed, naive. 

But what if we have misunderstood hope? 

Hope is not a feeling. 

Hope is action. 

Hope is a choice. 

Hope is a conviction. 

As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently said,

“So I don’t think it requires you to feel that you’ll eventually lose. On the contrary, I think it requires you to feel that even if you do lose, you have this steadfastness to keep going.” 

Hope is the steadfastness to keep going. 

We don't know what is around the corner; the future has not happened yet. 

Something is coming. But what? Might our actions or inactions effect what is to come? We can't know. Hope is the steadfastness to keep going.