Hopeful-Ish: Finding Jesus in Sadness and PainНамуна

A Living Hope

Jesus is a living, eternal friend. Jesus has a living, eternal love. Because He cannot die, everything that radiates from Him toward us cannot die either, whether that’s His love or mercy or friendship or hope.

Only the mercy of the living Jesus can heal us. Only the presence of the living God can satisfy us. And He can do that, regardless of our brokenness. We live in hope-adverse times; we are hopeful-ish at best, but Jesus isn’t thrown off course by what happens on this earth. And He’s never going anywhere. That makes His hope a present hope. It’s a living hope. It is something supernatural that you have been given in Jesus, and because you have been given it, it is something you can do. Because you have hope, you can hope.

The Greek word for hope, in 1 Peter 1:3, is elpis, and elpis means “the expectation of good.” The Christian life can mean the expectation of good. The hope we have in the gospel is a hope that expects good. Because when we’re in Jesus, the Living Hope, the one who always guards, and gives mercy, and leads, and loves, even our seasons of pain come with the expectation of future good.

In Chapter 1 of his first letter, Peter is saying that Jesus is so good, so glorious, and so for us that in the face of suffering, our expectation for good can be so strong that we rejoice. Jesus gives us hope, and when we experience that hope, we can act on it in any circumstance.

God Supernaturally Comforts

The older we get, the harder it is to hold on to hope when the world breaks our hearts. The more disappointments we rack up, the harder and more protective our hearts get. Lord, help us stay soft. Yes, death exists. Yes, life isn’t fair in the worst ways. But, I think that the miracle of walking with Jesus, walking with the Spirit of God, is His ability to re-soften us, to restore us, to reclaim what our enemy meant for evil.

Sadness is natural. Sadness is to be expected. Sadness is inevitable. But experiencing hope in the midst of sadness is supernatural. Jesus can help us experience soul-level hope, even while our hearts are sad. We can have hope that souls are eternal, that life is restorable, and that broken things are fixable, through the power of God.

Jesus is able to fix broken hearts and fix them forever. The hope He gives to the hopeless is a gift. He has compassion on those who suffer and doubt and struggle. We can bring Him our losses and our questions and our pains—our deep sad—and He knows what to do with them. Because He’s alive, He knows how to give us lasting and living hope right now, exactly when we need it. His hope is for today.