Hope. The feeling that what is wanted can be had. The expectation that what is desired can happen, and the desire being that things will change for the better. For the best. It is an active word; dynamic. Hope is the belief that things are not always going to be this way, that some day, there’ll be a change. (Obama anyone?)
Hope is perhaps more powerful than I realized at first. It drives us. It’s integral to our makeup because we are, as Zechariah so eloquently put, prisoners of hope (9:5). It can make people abandon reason, overlook truth, sidestep the status quo and sacrifice the things they hold close. You could almost say that hope is the master manipulator’s tool, if manipulation is having the ability to make something do what you want it to. Because in order to manipulate, you have to have an intended outcome. You have to have a result you want. And what’s the best way to get someone to do exactly what you want? Well, make it what they hope for as well.
Controlling and manipulating someone is interesting. It’s almost like a game. You try to control people based on their selfishness, out of your own selfishness. Because no matter how unique a person is, the common baseline that draws us all together is that we are, at heart, selfish. We are looking out for number one. We are out with our own plan, for our own intentions and purposes, self centered and desiring our own happiness and security. Our own comfort. “I want the best for me, even if it’s at the expense of you” is often the attitude. We say that’s despicable and treat being selfish as abominable, but when it comes down to it, we all have to own it. I haven’t lived long, and I have a lot more life to experience, but I am willing to bet that humanity hasn’t changed much since the beginning and isn’t going to change much in the future. It’s a cycle, selfishness, control, manipulation and need. And hope. Hope twisted by selfishness, fueled by need, opens us up to manipulation, followed by control. We tear each other up and spit each other out this way, “we” not being exclusive. Christians do it. Churches do it. I do it. We can’t escape it. We use each other, feed on each other’s needs. We are not capable of being immune to manipulation, and none are above manipulating.
It makes me wonder what would happen if there was someone whose hope lay completely outside of themselves. Imagine, if the things I hoped for were so much bigger than me, and were so far out of reach of everyday self-centered desires that drag us around and pull us down. What if I dwelt in the truth that the only reason I was created was to advance the glory of God? What if didn’t just say that, what if I lived as if that was true? What if the things I wanted weren’t ordinary, common hopes, the ones that are born from that emptiness that ties us all together, that gaping hole left by the fall from grace in the garden. To be accepted, to be loved, to be needed, to be wanted, to be secure, to be safe. What if I laid those aside, and instead hoped that God would perfect me through whatever means necessary, and that His glory would be manifest in my life, whatever that look like? What if my heart became God’s heart, and my desires were found in Jesus, and my hope was less of “my kingdom come” and more “Thy will be done”? What if my motivation was no longer gaining the results brought by living as God calls me to, and instead was simply that I am God’s, and He is mine, and I submit to Him because I love Him?
Is it possible to live in absolute truth? That is what we are talking about here. To see ourselves as God sees us, and to see our purpose clearly, no shadows, no distortion. Maybe this is what Paul meant by presently seeing dimly. We get these hints of what life should look like, images of what being in perfect relationship with God would be. And they give us something to hope for, driving us to something much greater than we could ever have imagined.
Freedom. Truth brings freedom. That’s what our souls yearn for. To be released from the charade we are cast as these feeble characters in, drugged by our painful state of dependence. Our state of need. To be immune to the desires of the flesh we were born into, and to run freely in the dawn as truth casts out the dark. This is the change we’re waiting on.
And today I realize that this is why the cross is the most beautiful miracle ever seen. It didn't just change our future. It changed our present. It gave us an option. It lets us choose life. It allows us to see something other than locked doors and an empty future when we open our eyes.
Jesus gave us the one thing we needed most when we ask to see truth. We are able to look past what would have been, what should have been; to grab hold of His hand and rise out of the ashes and be set free
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