Hope Dances!
Read: 1 Corinthians 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three. (v. 13) Theologians use the fancy word perichoresis to describe how the three persons of the Trinity relate to each other. A common definition of that complex word is, “A doctrine of reciprocal inherence.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t say things […]
Helambu Sherpa Language
Words of Hope Nepal is introducing a new broadcast program in the Helambu Sherpa language. Words of Hope’s Nepali ministry director first met a Sherpa pastor in 2013 while visiting the Himalayan region for ministry. The Sherpa pastor shared his own incredible conversion story. How he had gone from being apprenticed to a shaman to […]
False Hope
Read: Psalm 146 Happy are those . . . whose hope is in the Lord their God. (v. 5 NRSV) I wrote in our previous reading about trusting our physicians but not putting our hope in medicine. I want to widen the lens today and ask, “What (or who) else do we trust that we should not put […]
Trust, Hope, Medicine, Death
Read: 1 Corinthians 15:12-28 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. (v. 22) Theologian J. Todd Billings begins his book The End of the Christian Life with this thesis: “Whether you are nineteen or ninety-nine, whether you are healthy or sick, or whether the future looks bright or bleak, […]
Hope Soars
Read: Isaiah 40:21-31 Those who hope in the Lord . . . will soar on wings like eagles. (v. 31 NIV) Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote in what might be her most beloved poem. She makes a bird a metaphor for hope, and goes on to say that hope not only perches in the […]
The Hope of Heaven
Read: 1 Corinthians 15:42-58 We shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. (v. 49) I read an article about heaven the morning of the day my father died, having no idea how important that article would become by the end of the day. The author wrote about how the idea of heaven as a […]
Lament and Hope
Read: Psalm 102:1-22 My heart is stricken and withered like grass. (v. 4 NRSV) My father died while I was working on this set of devotions. Although he lived to be 91, and although he had been declining the past several months, his death came as a surprise. He went to the hospital, fell asleep, and […]
The Role of Suffering
Read: Romans 5:1-11 We rejoice in our sufferings. (v. 3) I have a friend who is one of the only female Christian leaders in Pakistan. Imagine living in a poor Muslim country with only a 1 percent Christian population and then repeatedly facing questions about your legitimacy as a seminary professor (because you are a woman) […]
Hopeless
Read: Psalm 137 How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? (v. 4 NRSV) The heading in my Bible for Psalm 137 says, “Lament over the Destruction of Jerusalem,” but I don’t agree that it’s a psalm of lament. It’s more a cry of hopelessness. The psalms of lament end with a turn […]