Keeping Hope Alive

In today’s first reading, Elijah is certain that God will break the long famine that has descended upon the land.  Like us when our earth is scorched  weeks on end with no rain in sight, Elijah keeps hoping.   Seven times the Lord directs Elijah to climb to the top of Carmel and look out to the sea. Every time, except the seventh, he reports nothing.  How often does it not seem as though “the parched deserts” our lives  are not going to receive the needed “rain,” yet we keep looking, hoping, believing that  the desired change will come, that things will get better, that God will not let us down. And we know that, even in the midst of the worst of droughts. Maybe a child is into drugs or is abusing alcohol, bad choices are being made again and again and again. And the Lord keeps  nudging us, as He did Elijah: “Look again.”  “Don’t give up hope.”  

The seventh time, Elijah reported, “There is a cloud as small as a man’s hand rising from the sea.”  The rains did come--in torrents. Something as small as that cloud rises on the horizon of our lives. Our hope is sparked and we say to our  family members, our friends, the members of our religious communities: Don’t give up! Things are going to change. I can see it. I feel it.  I know it even though I  cannot explain it. I just know that God is at work in that situation, as bleak as it might look right now!”  Beyond a doubt, that “sealed stone”  will be removed and the “dead” will be raised. Beyond a doubt, the “chains” that bind that person will be broken, the deaf ears will be restored to hearing, the blindness to sight, the hardness to softness. We just know it because that is the way our God works.

Lord, never let me lose hope no matter how bleak a situation may appear within or outside of myself. You are always at work beneath the surface, in the core of my being and in the depths of any situation. Help me always believe in your power to right wrongs, to transform parched deserts, to make parched hearts fertile, and to bring me or anyone else back from wayward directions one might be choosing.  I ask this in Jesus’ name.