What happens when you don't feel hopeful? When all the sugar cookies and Christmas Carols and twinkling lights can awaken from your slump ~ where you feel like a lump on a log. Do you fake it? Do you plaster on a smile while cringing on the inside? The people Isaiah ministered to in Exile knew hopelessness and helplessness. They knew that things were always trending up and to the right. That there was pain...and somehow God was there. So, here is a blessing for those discouraging days when your soul sags ~ even at Christmas.
A blessing for hope ~ Kate Bowler
God, these are darkening days, with little hope in sight.
Help us in our fear and exhaustion. Anchor us in hope.
Blessed are we with eyes open to see the accumulated
suffering of danger, sickness, and loneliness,
the injustice of racial oppression, the unimpeded greed and misuse
of power, violence, intimidation, and use of dominance for its own sake,
the mockery of truth, and disdain for weakness or vulnerability
—and worse, the seeming powerlessness of anyone trying to stop it.
Blessed are we who ask: Where are you, God?
And where are Your people —the smart and sensible ones
who fight for good and have the power to make it stick?
Blessed are we who cry out: Oh God, why does the bad always seem to win?
When will good prevail?
We know you are good, but we see so little goodness.
God, show me your heart.
How you seek out the broken, lift us on your shoulders, and carry us home—
no matter how weak we’ve become.
God, seek us out, and find us, we your tired people, and lead us out to where hope lies
where your kingdom will come and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Fill me with your courage.
Calm me with your love.
Fortify me with your hope.
P.S. Open your hands as you release your prayers. Then take hold of hope. As protest.
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