It’s not by accident we call the 1st Sunday of Advent, Hope—Hope, not to be confused with optimism. Hopeful living is a very different sort of existence than the culture of optimism promoted around us. Hope rejects the fatalism of the current situation by recognizing that we don’t have the right to make that assessment. Just because we can’t find any possibility amidst impossibility, does not mean none is there. Where God is present, impossibility is absent.
Hopeful living trusts in God’s possibility. Hopeful living changes our perspective, not by overcoming the impossible places in which we sometimes find ourselves, but by placing them within the realm of God’s hope-filled future.
The staff of the North Carolina Council of Churches hopes these devotions offered to you for the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany seasons will direct your gaze to the one from whom our hope comes.
