hoping

Just wishing and hoping and thinking and praying

Planning and dreaming ……. sang The Hollies nearly fifty years ago. Of course for them it was all about trying to win the right girl and save her from the embrace of another – a typical 60’s pop song!

This is the time in the calendar when so many look back over the previous twelve months and look forward to the coming year. This time we have been looking back over the past decade – is it really ten years since the millennium celebrations? Where has the time gone? I know that there are those who are just ‘wishing and hoping and thinking and praying, planning and dreaming’ for something better than what has gone before. The future can seem so uncertain and the past so painful. Perhaps this is why people turn to mediums and spiritualists to find comfort in past sorrow and assurance for the years to come.

In Paul’s letter written to the Ephesians, it says at the end of chapter 3 in verse 20-21      Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Paul reminds us that God is ultimately in charge. If God really is in control then He is not caught on the hop or unawares. He must know of the capacity that man has for discovery and progress. He must know of climate change and the perils in which we find ourselves. How He must long for the peoples of the earth to acknowledge Him and turn to Him but so many have given up on Him and turned to their own way. The voices of militant atheism and militant religion both in turn raise their voices and leave us in emptiness, fear and despair. Terror and terrorism seem to have the upper hand. Politicians are powerless.

At the beginning of another year and another decade I want to put my confidence in God. AS Paul writes to the Philippians - I want to know Christ! I want to entrust myself to the one who can do more than I can even comprehend or dream up. I am ‘wishing and hoping and thinking and praying, planning and dreaming’ but in the person of Jesus Christ who is the only one who can deliver what I really long for.

Have a brilliant 2010.