A Year of Hope or Positivity

Last updated on: January 6, 2018 at 12:53 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

A Year of Hope or Positivity 2018-01-06T12:53:36-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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HOPE Guglielmo_Borremans_-The_Theological_Virtue-_Hope This is a good year for hope: the virtue that aspires to more.

Hope is a seed for faith. Faith is more substantial than hope and finds in reason and experience evidence for the unseen. Faith sometimes begins in hope, because in dark times evidence or positive experience can be hard to find.

Hope is not merely wishing or fantasizing. If you hope you will grow wings and fly, then your delusions will always disappoint you. Hope is grounded in what we know of the world, God, and people. Hope aspires to goodness, truth, and beauty.

Keeping hope is hard as bad news in a broken world can overwhelm us. The last few years have seen some big, bad decisions politically, theologically, and socially. There has been much to oppose, but there is a danger in a position of opposition as default, at least for me.

We can lose hope, becoming crabbed, narrow, and sad. My primary business is to become a better person myself and looking toward others too much (“those people”) distracts from that work. Worst, I can feel better than others forgetting my own faults, needs, and work to do.

Hope is best cultivated in looking for what is good, not finding what is bad.

Some ideas should be opposed, yet this must always come from a posture of hope. We fight nonsense to point to good sense! This is not for some Disney-delusion that all is well if only we believe. Nonsense. All is not well, yet all will be well and more than well!

Reason suggests that God exists and experience confirms the suggestion. Since the revelation of God in Jesus shows that God is good, even better news, we can have hope. The jollity that flows from this conclusion is that despite our misuse of free will and the brokenness of creation, God is in control. The arc of history is towards God and justice. His Kingdom is coming, His will is done. Augustine was right that this providence is not manifest at any moment, certainly not in a Presidential term or even one human lifetime, but more gradually. As the church spreads globally over centuries, in fits and lurches, we see this truth. However, my life comes in increments of years and so I must live temporally in the light of eternity!

For this year, a time of hope, my goal is to focus on doing good. On social media and in my writing, my job is (to paraphrase my favorite line in The Last Jedi): fight for what I love and not what I hate. This is a year to praise wisdom, virtue, and joy when I find it and not so much to condemn the foolishness, vice, and ugliness in the world. My personal reading will focus on gaining historic depth and a more global focus. As Christianity explodes numerically in areas outside Western Europe and North America, I need to know more about other places where sisters and brothers in Christ live. My attention in free reading will be on Chinese history, not to become an expert, but to gain some perspective and knowledge.

Of course my professional life includes debates and jousting about ideas . . . that continues! However, my focus is going to turn toward the loved and learning about new things. This is a year to look for hope and to allow reason and experience to turn some hopes into faith!

Maybe you want to join me?

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