What are you hoping for this Christmas?

     It could be that special gift.  Maybe it's the healing of a broken relationship.  It's possible that all you want for Christmas is to survive it.  At some level, each of us are hoping for something at this time of year, and our hope usually boils down to this: we want the future to be somehow better than the past or the present. 

     As Christians, we can often feel a deep tension when the future doesn't change in the ways we hope for.   We have expectations that God doesn't always meet, and yet we still have the clear call of Scripture to choose hope.  We read how God's people faced terrible conditions that God didn't change, and yet hope endured.  We see how God develops the character of His people by not always giving them what they want, but rather what they need.  We read the cries of the prophets of the Old Testament, straining to see the world from God's perspective even while they walked through immense difficulty every day.  We read of the people of the New Testament, who were waiting for someone to come rescue them from oppression, only to find a Savior who wanted to rescue them from something much more destructive.  And all the while, we read the voice of God and the words of Jesus saying, "Have hope."

     Christians hope in two directions: the Already and the Not Yet.  We place our hope in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human, who was Already born as a baby to ransom us from the penalty of our sin.  We also choose to hope in His second coming, which has Not Yet happened, when the world will once and for all be transformed into the Kingdom that it was meant to be.   We live in this tension daily, whether we realize it or not.  Fortunately, the soundtrack of Advent can point us towards the comfort we need in the midst of the tension.