Ultimately, the question of hope gets us to the question of God, and of whether he is committed to us. Will God be there for us? Does he personally care enough to keep a commitment to people who wonder what the odds of making it are?
No matter what our faith or doubt or disbelief may be, the ultimate question is whether God is committed to us.
The interest of the question whether God is really up there cools down quickly if I cannot believe he is committed to me down here, and to others, to weak, needy, faulty people like me. But in those moments when the current of his committed presence flows into my weakness, his reality becomes ultimately important to me.
When I feel that I am committed to, unconditionally, I sense that God's being has become transparent to me. I know what I want to know most about who he is and what he has in mind.
And I get new hope for my own commitments to other people.
I get reassurance from stories of other people's experiences that tell them he is committed to them in spite of everything.
And it helps to know that people with a lot more faith than I have sometimes wondered whether they can depend on God's commitment. Biblical stories are often the best. Take the one about Moses and his surprising experience with the burning bush.
God had been on leave of absence for four hundred years-as far as anybody could tell-and four hundred years is a long time for anyone to be away. Even for God. People forget someone who stays away too long. And, as a matter of fact, Moses didn't even know God's name.
Moses, who had been brought up in the Egyptian Pharaoh's court, was living in exile at the time, a fugitive from Pharaoh-and, for that matter, from his own people-when God spotted him alone in the wilderness tending his father-in-law's sheep.
God flagged him down with a burning piece of chaparral that flamed oddly long. Moses went to take a second look, out of mere curiosity, but it was not what he saw, it was he heard there that shifted the winds of the future. God had come back.
The Lord was committed to renewing his relationship with the human family, and he wanted Moses to go back to Egypt, where the Hebrews had been slaves for four centuries, and prepare them for escape into freedom and a new commitment to God.
Moses had reservations. Who wouldn't? It would be very hard to feel at ease with a God who stayed away that long from people who needed his help as much as those Hebrew slaves needed it. Who was this unseen presence, this awesome voice, and the stranger behind the voice? Moses needed a name for this presence.
For an ancient Jew, to ask somebody's name was really to ask for a hint of his personal character. So, when Moses asked for God's name, he was asking, "What sort of God are you?"
God obliged. He told Moses his name.
The name told Moses what he wanted to know. Enough, anyway, for him to go back to Egypt and lead his people out of bondage.
What was that name? Moses knew. But it is not easy to say now. The Jewish people came to consider the name too holy for any ordinary person to put on human tongue.
And with a divine name, like most things, we lose it if we don't use it. What was written in the Torah was only four consonants, YHWH, no vowels. And who could even pronounce a word without vowels, let alone know what it meant?
When the ancient Jews spoke of this God, they simply substitute another name for the original, so they always knew what they were doing. But when it came to putting the Hebrew name into English, we had a problem. The educated guess was that it was originally a form of the verb to be. So it got translated as something like "I am who I am." Which seemed to convey a deep philosophical truth about divine essence and divine existence.
But Moses was not a philosopher, and what he really wanted to know was whether the stranger could be trusted. Would he be there when a God was really needed? Moses did not really care, at that moment, about God's essence; he cared about his presence.
So probably YHWH, the name God gave him at the burning bush, comes across best in English something like this:
"The one who will be there with you, the God who has made a commitment to you and intends to keep it."
No one could have guessed then the fantastic story that was going to follow this strange encounter in the desert. One crisis after another. And whenever crisis came, people always asked the same question: "Is the Lord here with us?" If they knee God was keeping his commitment, they received strenght to keep theirs. When it looked as if God was not keeping his commitment, they lost hope for their own commitments.
What I want to know about God is exactly what Moses wanted to know. Is he committed to me? If I can't keep my commitments to other people, is God still committed to me? To his human family? To the world?
When I do feel that he is the God who will be there-in the worst as well as the best of places- I feel that keeping personal commitments is what holds life together for me and gives it a future. And I get my confidence back. Commitment is what makes any human sort of life together possible on this earth.
It isn't that commitments suddenly get easy to keep when we believe God is committed to us. I've not have much experience, personally, with miracle solutions to the problems and pains that make keeping commitments hard sometimes-though if miracles work for you, be thankful for them. But when I feel that God is keeping his commitment to me, to us, to the world, in spite of a lot of reasons we've given him for calling it quits with us, it makes more sense for me to keep commitments I make to other people.
I am not a hopeful person by nature. When things get tough I am easily tempted to believe that the jig is up. I foreclose on the future all too soon. If my team is not ahead by at least two touchdowns in the final five minutes of play, I hear defeat blowing in the winds.
When two people are committed to each other, when the innerspring of their commitment is care, each for the other, there are possibilities in the toughest situations. Not certainties. But possibilities. Not possibilities of things being all we've ever wanted them to be. But possibilities of things becoming better than they are. Good enough to make the future together, as friends, as partners, as family, better for having kept on caring for each other just a little more than we care for ourselves.
Hope is the Energy to cope when life gets tough..
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Blessings...
i remain silent .