One of my all-time favorite Christmas songs is O Holy Night.

I have loved it since I was a kid. I’ve heard it hundreds of times and still to this day I can’t make it all the way through without my eyes welling with tears.

The depth of the lyrics, the intricacy of the music, the booming high points and the soft, reverent calm moments…it’s a true masterpiece and so powerful.

The line that gets me the most every time I hear it is

🎵“a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.”

 

A thrill of hope – the joyful anticipation of good.

The weary – tired, fragile, depleted – world rejoices.

For the past few years especially, those lines seem to ring over and over in my head during this season and I let myself sit with them a bit and ponder their meaning for us today.

These lyrics, penned over 170 years ago, hold so much weight.

No doubt this world has been weary. So many weary people, trying their best to stand under the pressure of life’s circumstances. Or maybe they’ve all but given up; the heaviness of it all feeling too much to bear.

When we’re in this place, hope can feel scary.

How can one hope when barely making it through the day? When things have felt so heavy for so long?

How can we make ourselves vulnerable to disappointment, yet again? The mere thought of opening up to the potential for pain seems an impossible ask.

Oh, my friend, let me tell you. I’ve been there. If you are reading this and feel like hope has been all but lost, you are not alone. My guess is that most of us have found ourselves in this wilderness at some point, and yet it is such a lonely place.

Romans 5:5 says that hope does not disappoint, but for those of us who have experienced the heartache of disappointment this can feel hard to reconcile. What about the times we’ve gotten our hopes up only to feel crushed when what we hoped for didn’t come to pass?

We know from Proverbs 13:12 that hope deferred makes the heart sick, and of course we don’t want to be sick, so what are we to do?

The answer, dear one, is hope.

And then hope again.

And again.

I know. It sounds scary. Impossible, even.

But when we consider the other options – devastation, emptiness, despair – there is only one choice that allows us to keep moving forward.

The choice is Hope.

It is a posture of the heart and spirit, and it is life-giving. It will infuse you with strength and help you continue putting one foot in front of the other. Step by step. Little by little. As you learn to run again.

Let’s also consider what we know about Abraham. The Bible says he hoped against hope – against all odds – and it was accounted to him as righteousness. Wow. That alone is an amazing outcome of hoping and trusting!

The scripture is true when it says that hope does not disappoint. Circumstances will surely let us down, but HOPE never will.

I want to encourage you with the second part of Proverbs 13:12, which says that desire fulfilled is a tree of life. 

What desire have you buried deep within you that you’re afraid to even say out loud because there’s been so much pain surrounding it?

What has the Lord promised you that you’ve nearly given up on because it feels like the waiting will never end?

Maybe a thrill of hope is simply too much for your weary heart to fathom in this moment.

I understand that.

Could you find a glimmer of hope? Or even just a shred?

Over the coming days and weeks, my prayer for you is that you let the Person of Hope begin to shine His light into those hidden places. The deep recesses of your heart that feel like they’ve been collecting dust for far too long.

Take heart, dear friend. He who has promised is faithful.

“For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”