“Manufacturing Hope”—A Prayer for December 5, 2020
The candles are a bit deceptive, Lord,
to be perfectly honest.
They aren’t meant to be, but it sure is easy to treat them as
some “delivered-in-30-minutes-or-it’s-free” guarantee,
ensuring that if we will only count four weeks’ time,
then the predictable Christmas magic will happen once more,
and we can go about our lives unchanged again.
But your kind of waiting, of hoping, is different.
The enslaved Hebrews waited four centuries
for freedom from Pharaoh;
exile lasted a lifetime at least.
Their seasons of watching were open-ended;
no candles promised them an end-date.
Our ancestors had to keep manufacturing hope,
day by day, breath by breath, for as long as it took,
and here, we get antsy over weeks or months of waiting.
So teach us, God, to live in a permanent state of active hope.
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