I like hope.
It’s an underrated virtue, I think. Persistent, but not showy.
Hope is confidence in the waiting. Eager expectation in the dark.
Hope is vision that sees just beyond the fall to the redemption.
Just beyond the struggle to the victory.
I like that the word translated hope in the New Testament means all this.
And it also means Jesus.
Hope comes easily for me sometimes.
The redemption, the victory is so close that I can almost taste it.
And then there are those times when the fall seems too hard. The darkness too thick. The waiting too ridiculously long.
Confidence fades. Expectation flickers. Vision fails.
And yet—
In all the hardness and thickness and longness, hope still wins.
Maybe not today.
Maybe not in the way we imagined.
But hope,
the one hope to which we were called (Ephesians 4:4)?
Hope still wins.