It’s no understatement to say 2020 has been a hard year. For the past 9 months, our lives have been turbulent, to say the least. We’ve dealt with the cancelling of in-person school and its activities, work, and vacations; lost jobs and money; periods of lock-down, isolation, and depression and anxiety; as well as sickness and death. Many of us wonder if Covid-19 and its effects will ever end. And now here we are celebrating Thanksgiving, and many of us, including me, have 2 questions: “Is there still a reason to be thankful?” and “Can we hold onto hope?”
This time a year, I start combing through my camera roll and begin to make our yearly “Wilson Family Year in Review” photo-book. As I started putting the book for 2020 together, I assumed it’d be less full and happy as the previous ones. However, as I kept scrolling through pictures, I surprisingly found I needed to keep adding more and more pages. Due to the looming, dark cloud of Covid-19 and its effects, I’d forgotten about the overwhelming number of great times our family shared together throughout the year. It was awesome to see and remember them! Despite having to cancel so many activities and trips (among other setbacks), we had numerous reasons to be thankful! So, yes, I believe if we take time to reflect, then we will see reasons we can be thankful.
Ok, what about hope? How can we have hope that our future will be better? I was recently looking up a popular Bible verse in the book of Lamentations 3 to share with a friend who I knew needed some encouragement. However, as I read more of the scripture, the more I realized the ancient text (it was written 2,500 years ago!) began to apply to our lives in 2020. You see, when we look only at our circumstances, then our “future and hope is lost” (verses 16-18), and we “become depressed” (verse 20). I think this is the view where many, including myself, often live our daily lives. It’s easy to. Just look around or watch any media outlet, and your hope will vanish quicker than free food at a surgical residency program (that’s very fast, trust me or just ask a surgeon)! So what’s the remedy to regain and keep ahold of hope? Verses 21-24 say “Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: the faithful love of God never ends! His mercies never cease! Great is His faithfulness; His mercies are new each morning. The Lord is all I have, and I will put my hope in Him.” It’s really very simple: maintaining a hopeful attitude all depends on what the object of your hope is. Is it prosperity and money? Political leadership? A relationship? Wellness and health? Prestige or popularity? All of these can, and likely will, as many of us have seen this year, leave you empty at some point. Hope in God is the only hope that will endure through anything.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future”, Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV).
