Ray Of Hope

On this mid-week day of a dying month, which marks the end of another year, another academic and an ecclesiastical year, let’s pause to remember living images of the setting sun. When the sun is setting, she is still as beautiful or even more strikingly beautiful in our sight. Her vividly bright colours, make for picture postcard scenes, which people all over the world rush to capture, with their powerful lenses. Her brightness is even more intense, before she totally leaves us, for a time. She still draws many to her, even in her final moments, as she majestically and powerfully displays the absolute wonder, majesty and never to be recreated glory of the One Creator of the earth, and all that there is therein.

These are but a few intense, life-viewing lessons and facts about the sun that knows a going down and a rising up. I have been constrained to remind us of these revitalizing, hope-engendering facts, because of a most sad conversation which I had with a young woman. Here was a person who, in her own words, had made some wrong choices in thought, word and deed and is now feeling as one without hope. Honestly, it was most painful listening to her, adamant that there was no hope for her, since there was nothing she could do to reverse her foolish choices. O, how that telephone conversation was becoming heavier and heavier, with the bleakness of self-pity, the darkness of self-bashing and the arrogance of self-conceit. I say this, because everything was about her, she, who is a believer. She flatly refused to give God the dominion and the power over her life, to take her going-down life, in the darkness of this situation and bring His light. O how I wanted her to know that even in her feeling of hopelessness, the power of Jesus, the Living Sun, could change her.

I have been compelled, I tell you, to include this meditation, as a Ray of Hope, to all whose lives, at the moment, feel like a month, or a year that is dying, without hope of going back. It is a life that at the moment only sees and knows darkness; a life that is feeding on its poor choices and guilt; a life that only remembers one’s disobedience, wrongdoings and trespasses; yes, a life that is messed up in many ways. Will you leave your thoughts for a moment, stop clinging to them for a second even, to allow the thoughts of God to enter? Will you hear Jesus saying to you that it is for you that He faced the darkest darkness, so that you can receive His Light of Hope? Will you surrender your pity-party attitudes and selfish talk to accept Jesus’ talk, as He says that He also has a party, a praise–party, where all heaven celebrate you, a sinner who has chosen to accept His invitation and look to Him?

I can assure you that in the midst of the growing darkness all around, Jesus will put such hope of peace and quiet in you, you will radiate with His light of forgiveness. Jesus is your hope and as soon as you leave evil’s way of keeping you clinging to your pitiful self, your guilt and your shame, you will know the hope our Lord has promised to every single sinner who comes to Him. You see, your hope lies in the belief that Jesus has already taken your bad choices, your foolish actions, your guilt, and your shame, and disposed of them all, once and forever, on the cruel cross. It was for you Jesus did it all, so that even in these moments of increasing gloom and darkness, fears and frights, and guilt and shame, you can cling to hope in Him. Jesus is the only one to shine His piercing, renewing, brightening and reviving rays of hope in you.