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CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Choose life – live in the hope brought by Jesus, writes John Dempster


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Auschwitz concentration camp as it is now.
Auschwitz concentration camp as it is now.

“Light brings hope,” said the Queen in her recent Christmas address. “For Christians,” she added, “Jesus is ‘the light of the world’.”

How we need hope this dark January!

We’re exhausted after 10 months of Covid, many are fearful or mourning, things sometimes appear to be growing worse rather than improving, and spring seems a great way off.

But how precisely does Jesus bring hope?

Parker Palmer.
Parker Palmer.

I’ve been reading an essay by the American Quaker, activist and author Parker J Palmer. He writes of the “eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than one’s own ego”. But he admits that he finds “contemplation” – reflecting on life’s meaning – difficult, and that the times of greatest insight come through what he calls contemplation by catastrophe. “I’m more likely to go deep only when I slam into a wall or fall off a cliff.”

In those hard places of depression and crisis, he finds “love, grace, forgiveness, and the experience of resurrection”.

Viktor Frankl.
Viktor Frankl.

I remembered Viktor Frankl’s memories of the nightmare of Auschwitz. He writes of the human desire for purpose, our “will to meaning” and describes the freedom of choice we have in even the deepest darkness. If a flickering hope sustains someone, they will choose life.

Is there then hope for us in our dark places?

I have always sought to choose life, opting to live in the hope brought by Jesus who in passing through the darkness of death was empowered to overcome that darkness with light.

It is a hope both for this life and for the next.

I trust God who does not always remove pain or death, or answer all our questions, but is forever with us, summoning light into darkness.

God is massive: Every prompting to choose life and light – in individual lives, in families and communities and nations, in the whole cosmos – has its source in God. Spring will come to our bewintered world.

Entering into this involves not simply me trusting God, but entrusting myself to God, and finding a freedom in that entrusting. The load is not ultimately mine to bear. This is not an opting out of personal responsibility, but an opting in to partnership with God, a longing to be prompted and energised by God’s resurrecting action in our darkest times.

How strongly, just now, do we sense our “will to meaning”? We have slammed into the wall of Covid, and we yearn for something infinitely larger than our own fragile egos to grant us hope.

Despite all my questions and uncertainties, I say “yes” to Jesus the light who is hope, and in him I find on my clearer-seeing days “love, grace, forgiveness, and the experience of resurrection”.

Related article: CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: We long for refugees to experience Christian love, by John Dempster


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