Hope Grows HERE- a Devotion

Cultivating Hope

A few weeks ago at church, I mentioned to someone that I tended to be melancholy. “Oh, that can’t be true,” she said. But it is. My natural way of thinking, since childhood, has been characterized by self-criticism and anxiety.

Last year, a wise woman in my Bible study talked so lovingly about her peaceful morning devotions. Her first prayer in the morning is “Good morning, God!” My first prayer in the morning is, “Lord, help me!” 

So a big part of my emotional and spiritual growth as an adult has been learning to cultivate hope. For me, hope does not come naturally. 

That’s why I find this passage in Romans 5 so comforting. It talks about hope as the outcome of a learning process, not as something I should naturally possess. I’m using the Revised Standard Version here, because it was the translation I had in my teens, and when I was thinking about this verse, this is what I remembered.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

“Hope does not disappoint us.” Those are the words that have echoed through my mind as I’ve been looking forward to this retreat. Hope does not disappoint us. 

Have you ever hoped, and was disappointed? I have. It seems like a long time ago, now, but I still remember our long journey of infertility. Seventeen years ago, on Valentine’s Day, I had my first miscarriage. It was devastating. It was one year after a surgery that the doctors thought might give me a chance at pregnancy, and five years after we had begun trying to have children. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “We had hoped…” and hoped and hoped, and had been disappointed.

Eight months later, I was pregnant again. I did everything I could to ignore it. Except, of course, it was all I could think about. I waited with dread for the tell-tale signs of miscarriage. I had dreams of blood. I refused to plan. When I eventually needed maternity clothes, I walked into a maternity clothing store feeling like an imposter. I had scuttled past that store hundreds of times in the previous few years, my heart aching. Actually buying maternity clothes seemed like a monumental act of faith. 

My mother-in-law wanted to throw me a baby shower, and I reluctantly agreed. I asked her to wait until the final weeks of pregnancy, when statistics showed that most babies born survived. Yes, indeed, I had looked up survival rates of pre-term babies on the Internet, and focused on 28 weeks. If I could just make it to 28 weeks, maybe then I could start to think about an actual living baby coming out of this pregnancy. Every so often, I would get on the computer and stare at that chart of survival rates again, counting down the weeks until I would allow myself to hope.

At 28 weeks, my husband finally persuaded me that we needed to buy a crib. Again, I felt like an imposter. I was still afraid. I cried in the middle of the baby store, practically hyperventilating at the hope and faith needed to choose and buy a crib.

At 34 weeks, I went into labor. My daughter, despite being a bit premature, was strong and healthy. She was born one week before the scheduled baby shower. My mother-in-law rescheduled it for a month later, and it became a celebration of our new little daughter. It was perfect.

I share this with you because I think many of us have had experiences which make hope difficult. If you live in this fallen world, you’re going to have disappointments, big and small. But what I love about these verses from Romans is that hope is not something we have to drum up inside ourselves. It is a process, and paradoxically it can come out of the very same suffering that seems like a hope-killer. 

Listen again: we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

This sounds weird to me, but it’s right there in the verse: Suffering is the beginning of hope. How can that be? Well, I can say that during the pregnancy that gave me my first daughter, and during the two more miscarriages that followed, and during the pregnancy and NICU stay of my second daughter, I clung to God as hard as I knew how to do. I could not bring myself to hope for a living child. I couldn’t do it. 

What I could do was hope in the sustaining love of Jesus to bring me through, whatever happened. What I could do is pray my morning prayer all day. Sometimes that’s all you can do. Lord, have mercy. Jesus, help me get through this day. 

I was still fearful. At times, I was fiercely angry with God for putting us through this. But still, I hoped. I hoped that whether we ended up with children or not, that God would still make my life meaningful. Sometimes, often, that hope was an act of the will. It did not come easily. 

But here is the key to this verse. The source of our hope is not our life circumstances. We do not place our hope in our own abilities, our own personality, our own hearts. Our source of hope comes from outside of ourselves. It comes from God pouring his love into us. It comes from Jesus loving us and sacrificing himself so that we CAN hope. Cultivating hope means cultivating our trust and our faith in Jesus. It means hanging on to the light of Jesus, even when our world looks dark. It means enduring suffering with the knowledge that Jesus walks with us, and that he went before us. 

Hebrews says that Jesus, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” That joy is the joy of bringing us into the kingdom. That joy was reconciling us to God and giving us hope. Jesus went to great lengths to give us the one hope that will never disappoint us—himself. Cultivating hope means remembering what lies at the end of our journey, and that is the “hope of sharing the glory of God.” 

As we leave this place, I pray that we leave a little more centered on Jesus, a little more aware of how the Holy Spirit is working in our lives, a little more steeped in God’s love for us. Whether you’re in a season of suffering, or joy, whether you feel satisfied with your life or long for a change, always remember this—Jesus is our hope, and *that* hope will *never* disappoint us.

This devotion was written by Jennifer Gross

 and shared at the Wellspring Women's Retreat- 

Hope Grows Here.

Jennifer is a member of 

Prince of Peace Lutheran Church

 in Springfield, Virginia

 and a contributing writer for

 Journeys of Faith.