Hope: Where can I find it?

Our world is in search of hope. The hope that things could be better. The hope that this isn’t all there is. 

But for many, sooner or later that hope turns to cynicism.

The English novelist, Charlotte Bronte, once said that ‘hope has proved a strange traitor’. There had been three Bronte sisters.  When Charlotte wrote those words, one of them was dead and the other lay dying. And Charlotte, the one that was going to be left alone, felt that hope was a traitor who had promised much, but let her down.

The Scottish writer, Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote of how his ambitious hopes had failed. His heart, he said, had been ‘burned out with the lust of this world’s approbation’. In other words, his longing to know the approval of others had been disappointed. And he wrote to a friend that if it wasn’t for something inside him stopping him – surely his Christian upbringing – he would have poisoned himself or drunk himself to death, as other writers had done.

The danger of hope turning to cynicism increases with age – if it becomes clear that our vision of what life might look like isn’t going to happen. When we’re young, we think there’s still time to achieve what we want to achieve. But the growing realisation that it isn’t going to happen can lead to despair.

One of the oldest historical accounts we have is about a man called Job. It’s recorded in the Bible. And at one point he says: ‘My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle and come to their end without hope’.

Others actually get the thing they’d always wanted – only to find it blow up in their face, or slip through their fingers like dust. The buzz is short and the satisfaction temporary.  And it leaves them empty, hurt, angry or confused. What would it be like to achieve the thing you’ve always dreamed of? Here’s Jonny Wilkinson, speaking about winning the Rugby World Cup in 2003 by scoring the winning drop goal in the last minute of extra time:

‘I had already begun to feel the elation slipping away from me during the lap of honour around the field. I couldn’t believe that all the effort was losing its worth so soon. This was something I had fantasized about achieving since I was a child…I’d just achieved my greatest ambition and it felt a bit empty’.

So is our instinct to hope misguided? When so often ‘it’s the hope that kills you’?

In fact, if the material universe is all there is, where does this idea of hope even come from? To hope is to think that things are not as they should be. It’s to look at our lives, or to look at the world, and to say: ‘Something’s not right here. Something’s broken. But that it can be put right’.

And that fits perfectly with a Christian way of looking at the world. Because the Bible tells us that neither we nor the world were created to be like this. Instead, something has gone badly wrong. But God has promised that it won’t be like this forever.

One day, all wrong will be put right.

But if you swap that out for a purposeless universe, who is to say that things are meant to be any better than they are? In fact, how can we even talk about meaning? And so it’s no surprise that people who walk away from Christianity lose hope. Because what reason do they have left to hope that their life will get better rather than worse?

I’ve quoted two famous novelists already. Here’s a quote about a third, from the most recent biography of Thomas Hardy. His biographer is trying to put her finger on where his dark view of life came from. And she concludes that: ‘In a sense, he never got beyond his own loss of Christian belief, which removed hope’.

Now, stopping hoping for something isn’t always a bad thing – if what we were hoping in was a false hope. And the Bible certainly teaches that false hope is possible. Particularly when it comes to those who hope to get to heaven without trusting Jesus.

But to reject the true Christian hope is to reject the only solid basis for hope in the universe. As the Apostle Peter could say: ‘According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope’.

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 2 November 2023

Goodbye to Amy

At the end of August we said goodbye to Amy who has moved back to Northern Ireland to take up a job in her hometown. Amy has played a big role in our congregation during the past seven years, particularly as a Sabbath School teacher. We are thankful for her time in Stranraer and will miss her a lot!

GO Team 2023

During the last week of August we had a go team (short term mission team) with us. The team members were Ruth, Hannah, Rosaleen, Hamish, Trinity, Campbell and Matteo.

Some of the team’s activities are summarised below:

  • Psalm singing in the town centre on the Lord’s Day afternoon, which led to a new contact being made.

  • Almost 5,000 leaflets advertising our mission services were distributed in Stranraer, Castle Kennedy and Sandhead.

  • On the Wednesday morning, some of the team did practical work at the church, while others helped run a drop-in. We were very encouraged to have 9 people come in over the two hours.

  • The team also helped to set up for a congregational BBQ at the manse on the Wednesday evening, to which the congregation were encouraged to invite family and friends.

  • On the Thursday, after a Covenanter tour to Anwoth, the team ran a One Day Bible Club. We had five church children in attendance, as well as two from outside the church.

  • On Friday, the remaining team members (some left on the Thursday) did some cleaning up at Stair Park (home of Stranraer FC), which has resulted in some very favourable comments being made to Stephen (who serves as club chaplain) at Stranraer’s home match the following Saturday.

  • All in all it was a really encouraging week, for which we give thanks to God.

Retirement: The New Afterlife?

The fastest growing metro area in the United States is called The Villages. It’s a retirement community that takes up eighty square miles of central Florida and is home to one hundred and forty thousand people. It contains nine state-of-the-art hospitals, a dozen sprawling shopping centres, over one hundred bars and restaurants, and more than fifty golf courses.

Retirement is certainly big business. The US has a total GDP of twenty-three trillion dollars, but the assets of all American pension funds are nearly fifty percent larger. In the words of journalist Sam Kriss, ‘mass consumer pensions have turned our entire adulthood into a preamble to old age. You work for three, four, five decades—all so you can enjoy those few, brief, useless years between retirement and death’. He goes as far as to say that ‘the entire global economy is now a machine for producing satisfied retirees’.

The Villages attempts to sell people the thing they have been working for all their lives – perfect leisure before they die. Sounds ideal? Kriss visited the Villages and says that it’s the worst place he’s ever been to.

So what’s not to like? According to Kriss, the message of The Villages is that ‘the true purpose of human life is to have fun, to drink and play golf, and you can only really experience the true purpose of human life once you’ve retired’.

It used to be that people believed in an afterlife. The Christian hope, for example, is that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us’ (Romans 8:18). But take away the hope of a glorious future beyond this life and we have to try and find it here and now.

The idea of ending our days in a retirement community in Florida might be beyond most of us. But increasingly, people are living for retirement. And yet that hope often disappoints. Some don’t make it that long. Nor is it uncommon to hear of someone retire and then almost immediately be hit with a terminal diagnosis just as their long-planned future opened up before them. Others soon become too ill to enjoy it.

Indeed, the precariousness of life in The Villages is the elephant in the room. There are no cemeteries. The ambulances and hearses are unmarked. ‘Nobody talks about the fact that every few weeks, a vaguely familiar face vanishes from the pickleball court’.

Retirement is a very fragile basket to put all our eggs in. And even if someone does hold onto their health, what if the thing they’ve been putting their hope in for so long lets them down? What if the promise of inactivity turns out to be a nightmare?

For many others, it’s not retirement they’re living for, but the weekend. And again, if there’s no afterlife, it makes a certain amount of sense. Indeed, the Apostle Paul could say, ‘If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die’ (1 Corinthians 15:32). If this life is all we have, then any enjoyment we are to have must be found here and now.

So does that mean that those who don’t believe in an afterlife will be happier in this world than those who do? Not necessarily – because that’s a lot of weight to put on the things of this world. Hoping that a relationship will make us happy is a lot of weight to put on another person. It’s the same with our weekends, a holiday or retirement itself.

The Bible doesn’t teach a kind of asceticism in which the good things of this life are to be shunned. Rather, it’s only when God is put in his proper place that the good things of this life can be fully enjoyed. Only when we’re not looking to them to bring us ultimate happiness – when we’re not looking to them to do what only God can do – can we properly enjoy them.

The big objection of course is that believing in an afterlife is a pipe dream. But listen to the words of converted atheist C. S. Lewis: ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world’.

Lewis said that while there are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give you what really want, ‘they never quite keep their promise’. Earthly pleasures are simply signposts to something greater.

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 28th September 2023