Rev Charli Tupper

Have you ever gotten an ear worm where a song or a phrase won’t let you go?  This happened to me this week, only it wasn’t a song, but the word hope.   For many years I have wondered what hope really is.  In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul writes, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”  

We often talk about the power of faith and love.  These qualities are innate within us.  So, what is this hope that abides?  The dictionary defines hope as a feeling of expectation and desire for something. I looked up the Greek word which is Elpis: joyful and confident expectation.  

One idea about hope is that it is mere wishing and wanting something to be different than it is without seeing a possibility for change.  Yet, I have begun to see it in a new light.   For me, hope is the seed that carries within it the elements of what is desiring to be experienced or expressed in and through our lives.  This seed is ripe with divine ideas and the energy necessary to activate every innate quality needed to bring forth a full harvest.  True joy activates within us a joyful and confident expectation of fulfillment.  

What is the difference between a joyful and confident expectation of good and faith?  Faith is the assurance of things hoped for.  Hope must come first and then we feed our hope with our faith.   Without hope there is no need for faith, because there is no desire for anything.  People who experience hopelessness are desireless. 

Through the power of meditation, study, and connecting with others, we prepare the soil of our mind to receive seeds of hope.  These seeds are continually being planted in our subconscious mind.  Just as when we plant a seed in well prepared earth there is a spark of life that puts into motion the full unfolding of the seed, we too, through the spark of hope unfold into our highest nature.