Day 83: With Hope in Your Heart

DAY 83

Faith in the Midst of a Pandemic

A series of daily reflections for people of faith

by Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor

Patuxent Presbyterian Church, California, Maryland

WEEK TWELVE: FRIDAY 5 JUNE 2020

With Hope in Your Heart

“Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain, though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone! You’ll never walk alone.” - Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Class of 1916, Music by Richard Rodgers, Class of 1923. To the Class of 2020, Congratulations on your commencement. We walk on together. Columbia University, 17 May 2020.

This recent full-page congratulatory ad reminds us that across the country high school and college graduates are experiencing a different kind of commencement into a world marked by an unemployment level unseen since the Great Depression. Many come from families whose homes are facing foreclosure because their parents have lost their jobs or their family-owned business has gone under. The coup de grace to the death of hope for many is a student loan burden calling for repayment in the context of no job prospects.

So how do you “walk on, with hope in your heart” when the panorama of hopelessness surrounds the soul like a 360 degree funeral pall? Hope by definition requires something ahead of itself to which it points, its source other than ourselves. In the reassuring opening words of the Heidleberg Catechism written in Germany in 1562, in the middle of a century racked by plague, famine and war:  

Q: 1. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A: That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ ...

This locates our source of hope not in ourselves but in Jesus Christ. It is a hope that has as its ultimate anchorage the promise of “… the blessed hope - the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” - Titus 2:13. That is always ahead of us, a steady source of hope.

A prayer for you: “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, …” - Ephesians 1:18.

Reflective question: Are you ‘walking on with hope in your heart’? If not, talk to the Source of hope. 

Reflective Scripture: Romans 5:5 – “… hope does not disappoint us …”

Reflective hymn:

“It is Well With My Soul” – Horatio Spafford (1828-1888)

But, Lord, ‘tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,

The sky, not the grave, is our goal;

Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!

Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul.