Learning to Hope

Happy Thanksgiving. This is the first time I've ever sat down at our home computer to write a blog. It's weird. The screen is so much bigger than my laptop. Being home has been great, but being on break has just been oppressive. I'm working on my fourth paper for the weekend and I still have one more due at the end of exam week that's 12 pages that I haven't even really started yet. I had this vision in my head of getting everything that I had to do for the rest of the semester done over break. I did pretty well, but I've still got that huge paper looming over my next two weeks.
Break was blah, but being at home was nice. This was the first time our entire family has been together in a long time (mostly because of me). I got to see all of my neices and nephew and two of them spent most of break at our house. After a while I started to realize why the game Hide and Seek was invented. I got so sick of hearing the words "come pway wif me" that I ended up hiding rather than have to sit and play cars for another hour. Added onto the constant need to play with him, being around my nephew was like playing a non-stop game of MadGab where I had to decode everything he said. I don't know how many times I just looked at him and said "I have no idea what you're talking about". Dont' get me wrong, I love my nephew and nieces, but it did make me realize that I'm glad having kids is nowhere in my immediate future.
Tonight I volunteered to go with my home church to a men's shelter in Toledo to help serve a meal. They also asked me if I would be willing to give a message beforehand. I made myself say yes even though I knew it would be hard and would force me to really think about what to say. I had a hard time trying to figure out what a person like me had to say to people like them when I have everything I could ever need and more and they are scraping to get by. I think I initially had a hard time with this because so much of what I've been conditioned to expect from the church is a set of morals. We go to church to hear about how God wants us to live, right?
While I think that God does make demands on our lives if we truly decide to follow Him, I think that our churches could do a better job of simply proclaiming the Good News. Yes, I can become a better person but that is only because of the work that Christ already accomplished. Now that I think about it more, I can't believe I had a hard time finding something to say to those people tonight. Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to set the captives free, and to let the oppressed go. So that's what I tried to convey tonight. The message was titled "The Bravest Thing We Have is Hope" and I tried to show what it truly meant to place hope in Jesus more than just on the surface. I thought it went well and afterwards one of the men there made the comment that it really sounded like I meant what I said from the heart. I told him that if it didn't, then I had failed. Part of me wanted to put up a transcript of the message, but that would be entirely too long. I will leave you with a nugget that I really feel like God used to speak through me to myself about how sometimes we we misuse our faith in Christ selfishly.

"Your hope means nothing until it means something for everyone."

Is your hope too small?