Harbors of Hope

As we ebb and flow in a sea of uncertainty, churches can serve as harbors of hope for an anxious world. Churches don’t have to provide concrete answers and trumped-up optimism. They just need to be stable, safe places where people can wrestle with the questions of the day and deal with the world as it really is, while latching onto something beyond themselves that is timeless, true, and never dies.

Hope is more than happy optimism, and it runs deeper than the quick fixes we are often sold. Hope connects us to a reality beyond ourselves—to a truth and love that was in the beginning and remains for eternity. Hope helps us hold onto what is unseen and is undeniable to those who believe.

Churches can be places of hope by naming the harsh realities around us through lament. To lament is to name that things are not as they should be and to cry out to God to make things right. To lament is to sit in the rubble of lost dreams and see things as they truly are. Instead, we often hurry through the pain to arrive at some hollow, manufactured joy. When we allow ourselves to lament, however, the tears of lament clear our eyes to see the steadfast love of God that endures forever. Even in the midst of our broken dreams, the love of God remains. That is real hope, and real hope is what we need most of all.

The book of Lamentations names the pain, sorrow, and destruction of the city and, with it, the loss of Israel’s dreams. The author shares an honest telling of a devastating reality, holding nothing back and covering nothing up. Yet in the middle of the truth-telling and reckoning comes a moment of clarity:

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” - Lamentations 3:19-24

What if churches became places to name reality instead of distorting it? What if churches learned the gift of earnest lament so that honest hope could be unearthed?

When things get hard or when we don’t like the way things are going, we are tempted to buy into puffed-up optimism, the latest spin, or flat-out lies to get us what we want. The Church needs to deny the temptations to give the people what they want.

Instead, the church should live more fully into who they already are: a people of faith who believe in something far greater than themselves. A community who shows up when life is falling apart with a trust in a love that endures. A people with a sacred book of stories that is full of people telling it like it is—telling the stories of promise, and the ones of rebellion; the stories of miracles and the stories of mishaps; the stories of rubble and the stories of rebuilding; the stories of an ornery, hardheaded, rebellious people and their loving God who will never let them go. There is hope in our stories. All we have to do is share our stories. There is hope in who we are because of whose we are. The church should share that with the world!

As people are being tossed to and fro in a sea of spin, lies, and the peddling of unrealistic dreams, the church can be a harbor of hope, anchoring people to a deeper reality that provides rest for their weary souls. It may not be popular, and it might not draw the crowds, but as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption says, "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing, and no good thing ever dies."