Choosing to Choose Hope

Yesterday…

…The BBC said that we shall have mixed weather this weekend. Tomasz Schafernaker said that we should take sunglasses in one hand and an umbrella in the other… Choice? We can take either, neither or both.

…I heard of a fifteen-year-old lad who went to purchase some glossy car magazines. The cashier at the checkout said, ‘Come off it. You can’t even drive!’ The young man replied, ‘No, but I can dream.’ Choice? He chooses to cherish his dreams.

…Yesterday’s Eastern Daily Press highlighted Lowestoft’s ongoing problem with kittiwakes. This protected, endangered bird nests on the pier, throughout the town. In particular kittiwakes nest above shop doorways causing continuing extensive noise, smell and mess. Choice? The shopkeepers can do nothing.

Today is Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Some call it Low Saturday or Black Saturday. Jesus has died. God appears inactive.

Jesus’ disciples have been through Tomasz’s choice – ‘Will you follow me? – Take it or leave it’ They made the choice and followed. They’ve enjoyed the choice of car-magazine-boy. They’ve cherished big dreams about Jesus and their future.

But now they’re faced with shopkeeper’s choice. There’s mess and smell… but no noise. All is silent. They appear to have no choice. There’s no Jesus, no apparent God activity, no hope. They can do nothing. They’re hiding.

It’s a place that many of us may find ourselves.

This morning I was reading the Job narrative. Job is suffering physically, psychologically, spiritually. His God seems absent. My ‘Message Bible’ says:

“I travel East looking for him—I find no one;
    then West, but not a trace;
I go North, but he’s hidden his tracks;
    then South, but not even a glimpse.

It’s in this place of the apparently absent God, that he chooses to believe that God is there: he chooses hope.

But he knows the way that I take;
    when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.

Choice? Job chooses belief and hope