Monday, December 17, 2007

Faith and Hope

Today we had an amazing service despite the brutal weather! Jay preached an amazing message about the suddenlies of God. If there is anything in your life that you are waiting for... download it!

One of the thoughts was about faith, hope, and love.

I got thinking, what is the difference between faith and hope?

The biggest deferred dream of my heart, as you already know, is that of a spouse and family of my own. In the meantime, though, I am working hard to seek first the kingdom of God, and to find a place of contentment. As with anything that you are waiting for, there is a tension between the anticipation, and not letting what is not yet, distract you from what is now. God has a purpose for each day and if we are seduced by the idea of what will happen tomorrow, we will not learn what we need to learn today, and we miss out on so many things in the now. So we walk this tightrope of hope.... or is it faith?

Sometimes in this battle to find the middle ground, I can be very hard on myself. I think sometimes that if there continues to be hope in what is ahead that it means that I am not content in the now. So I have been working to discipline my mind to stay in the now... except it is crippling my ability to dream big dreams but when I dream big dreams... they include the things that I am hoping for.

All that to say that sometimes high hopes can be misinterpreted as lack of faith! Does that make any sense? Almost like, if I trusted God fully, I wouldn't have the need to rely on the hope.

This is one of those things that is going to twist me around for a few days.

Here's the question then....
what is the difference between faith and hope? and how do you balance the two?

1 comment:

Jenn said...

That is a very good question. We are doing advent candles in my house and we lit the "hope" candle this Sunday and I had to really think about how to describe "hope" (mainly because my audience was a 4 and a 6 year old!). I ended up describing hope as desiring something that we really want that is really good. But perhaps Hebrews 11:1 speaks to your question???
"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."