HOPE DOES NOT DISAPPOINT

One of the things I havent addressed on this blog is my title "Hope Doesn't Disappoint."
I have really come to beleive this quite a bit. Today in chapel during communion, I felt this.

At one point in life I would have said then that yes my hopes have disappointed me. But this is when maybe my idea of hope was coming from things of this world: things like our political structure, having a romantic partner, having a decent paying job, having my own place are on the list of things that I think that I would think about how my own hopes have defied me.

However as much as I would be happy for any one of these situations to change, I do not think that this is where true happiness or hope comes from. My hope comes from God and God alone. While changing any one of these previously mentioned situations would make me feel really happy, that is not where my hope comes from. My hope comes from God and God alone. It is God alone that does not disappoint me. While God can work through people and things in this world, my trust is ultimately in God alone.

Today in chapel, I felt myself witnessing the amazing ways in which God does not disappoint me. Even though I had been feeling a little weary from an interaction I had the previous day, witnessing word and sacrament really recharged me. There was something about the sermon today that reminded me about this more deep joy in my life. While I shy away from expressing a lot of emotion in worship as much as possible because I want to be socially appropriate to a certain degree mostly to show respect to others, and I find God in reason and thinking analytically. I tend to prefer sermons that challenge me or get me to think over ones that are there to comfort. However I felt tears running down my face in spite of this all because I felt like God really was talking TO ME and that God really does take away all this hurt and fear. I felt recharged after having the sacrament of Holy Communion with this sense of joy that it has given me.

I felt hopeful. I went back to class with people where I feel that for the first time in seminary people are struggling with the same type of questions about the church that I struggle with. And I felt this burning in my heart, knowing that the spirit of God really is in this place. Not only is the spirit of God with me, it is in this community.

And there is this hunger that I have to keep this spirit invoked power that I felt as much as possible. I am at a place where I am reimaging a lot of things realizing that the ideals that I held even as a college graduate really are not realistic. Amongst them is my protestation I would never be a pastor or marry a pastor. Maybe I am called to be a pastor in a more nonconvential sense of the word. I'll just have to be sure not to marry a pastor to keep myself accountable ;) There is a certain level of hope in knowing that I can reimagine life to a certain degree. But the even greater hope comes from knowing that this spirit of God that I really had an unusual sense of today is amongst me and is amongst the community of God.

I know that this may be the most stereotypically religious of the postings I will have ever put up. However it serves as a reminder to me that hope IN GOD never disappoints. Its when the hope is put in anything else that it disappoints.