Hope in Your Eyes

February 2009 Newsletter

By Marie Goodyear

In a "Peanuts" cartoon, Lucy is in her usual position in right field when suddenly a batter hits a fly ball to her.  She looks up to catch it, only to have it drop behind her.  She picks up the ball and saunters to the pitcher's mound to give it to Charlie Brown, saying, "Sorry I missed that one, manager.  I was hoping I'd catch it!  Hope got in my eyes.”

This story of Lucy and her missed fly ball is appropriate because it reveals our human confusion over what hope really is.  Lucy confuses hope with wishful thinking.  Wishful thinking anticipates that for which there has been no effort, no improvement.  Lucy never practices and, when she is in a game, she is more interested in criticizing others than working at making her own game better.  Wishful thinking is, in many ways, the opposite of hope because deep within it, wishful thinking knows that what is wished for will probably never happen.

If we say we hope for something, we must also be willing to do the work to make that hope a reality.  We live “in the meantime.”   We know that there are many possibilities for our future, for the future of our world, for the future of our church.  But they are not yet.  And they will never be if there is no work done to make them happen.  We hope for what we do not see and what we would like to see.  But only if we take action to make our hopes more than just wishes, will we see our hopes bear fruit.

We live in the interim, in the in-between times.  We know that God is faithful in those times, and we must be faithful, too.  We must go about our lives, working and resting and loving and praying.  We do all of these things without having any control or knowledge about the outcome but simply because we trust that God will work with us to bring us to the fulfillment of all our hopes.