This week I felt led to reflect on Ephesians 1:15-20 for our devotion this week. Here is the text of that passage.

 

For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realm.

 

For those going through any kind of trial, it is common to encounter well-meaning people who seek to stir our hope by schooling us in God’s deep ways, who want to tell us our struggle is part of a larger plan and a bigger mystery that we cannot know from here but that we will understand one day. I have tremendous tolerance and even respect for mystery, I am content most of the time to abide the unknown.

 

But let’s be honest, when it comes to suffering, in the astounding variety of forms by which we experience it in this world, it is not enough to chalk it up to mystery, or a larger plan. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the bigger mystery, or in knowing that I might have a better grasp of it someday in another world. It’s just that in times like these, “someday” is not, in itself, sufficient to get us through a bad day, to move us from one moment to the next in a world where someone we love lies so very ill or let us down.

 

It is in the midst of trials though, that I’ve been surprised to find that hope, unbelievably, never left me. Hope is stubborn. It lives in us like a muscle that keeps reaching and stretching, hope keeps working even when we do not will it.

 

The apostle Paul well knew the deep presence of mystery in our lives with God. But he, too, was uninterested in simply abiding in the mystery or locating our hope in a “someday” realm. Paul was talking about a knowing that is tied with resurrection. He was talking about a hope that is bound together with the life of the risen Christ. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead, Paul makes it clear that Christ, in turn, put his power to work in us, and not just for someday, but also for now: that this hope is active in our lives as we press into the mystery that attends us.

 

Hope is not always comforting or comfortable. Hope asks us to open ourselves to what we do not know, to pray for illumination in this life, to imagine what is beyond our imagining, to bear what seems unbearable. It calls us to keep breathing in times of trials. In those times of trials when our every waking thought is about whatever trial we are facing, hope calls us to turn toward one another when we might prefer to turn away. Hope draws our eyes and hearts toward a more whole future but propels us also into the present, where Christ waits for us to work with him toward a more whole world now and in the days to come.