True Hope vs. Cheap Hope

Cheap hope makes us feel comfortable and content at the end of the day. Cheap hope settles for mediocre.

Cheap hope comes in nicely wrapped packages and promises of easy answers. It looks for silver linings and is content with good enough.

True hope makes us uncomfortable. True hope supposes that a better way is possible, that there is potential for the world to shift, to realign, to be made new. And this exposes the uncomfortable truths of how things are right now.

True hope, the discomforting, ground-shaking kind of hope will make us pass through fire and pain on the way to resurrection and renewal. True hope costs something.

Advent is about attending to true hope. Advent says that waiting and longing and struggling and trusting in impossibility leads us to a truer hope.

The Advent of Christ opens up a story that turns religious systems upside down and calls all who follow him to repentance and radical service. This hope leads to the sacrifice of all we have, even our very lives, in the great hope that as we lose it all, we find it all.

True hope — Advent hope — turns the world upside down.

In hope,

Seth