I have high hopes for 2012.
I guess that is probably the way most years begin; with high hopes.
Hopes that maybe my daughter will discover that sleep is a necessary ingredient to maintaining life here on earth.
Hopes that my life will become simultaneously more multi-dimensional and more whole.
Hopes that I will become more able to model this life I believe we have all been called to live.
Hopes that in some constant and subtle ways I would be able to embody the beauty of God's love and grace.
Of course the risk of high hopes is always that we would inevitably fall short. I know this. But I choose to do it anyway. I imagine this is so great a fear for some of us that we have learned to have reasonable hopes. Small hopes. Hidden hopes. There is an older woman in my congregation who reminds me each time after I preach that I am very ambitious. I always smile and nod.
Having faith in a loving God in such a broken world is ambitious. And yet we still have faith.
There is a wisdom in embracing the weight of gravity which holds us back from hoping too high. Years teach us the risk of hoping. But it is our faith which keeps us from allowing that to hold us down.
Whatever height our hopes rise to this year, it is the commitment to our faith which promises to pull them higher. That whatever ditch we sit in or hole we peer out of, faith gives us a panoramic view of what could be for each of us and for all of us.
The view of the believer inspires in each of us high hopes.
A life of faith calls us out of this paradigm of the limited and finite and redefines all possibilities. It pulls together visions of brokenness and wholeness and blesses us with the ability to hope.
Hopes as high as those given to us through the practice of our faith are predictably ambitious but it's in our groundedness that we are able to fully comprehend how high it is that God is calling us. Hoping doesn't disregard reality but must fully acknowledge and except it in order to even exist.
There can be no hope without the acceptance of our current reality.
And, in spite of our cultural desire toward the rational disregard of creative possibilities, God is calling us to hope; an irrational practice. This year and the next. To have faith in our ability to believe in the promises which have yet to present themselves. To have courage to risk in ways which may push us closer toward the height of God's intentions.
This is Faith; the knowledge that no matter how far down we feel in relationship to that place we hope to be, God's presence exists in the difference, intimately connecting us to that which we imagine. It is in our faith that we are able to experience the reality of the hopes unseen and feel the presence of the promises yet unfilled.
God is not just with us. God is with you. Hope high.
