31 Reminders from Eden: HOPE

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

One of my favorite passages is 1 Corinthians 13. But how it got relegated to weddings and Hallmark sappiness is one of Eden Lost’s greatest acts of pulling the wool over our eyes.

And here I’ll step up on a short soap box. Context, world, context. Do you see the mess that the Corinthians had gotten themselves into? Have you read chapter 12, chapter 14, and the rest of the book and seen how very much they needed Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Cloud and Townsends’ Boundaries? They had bickering, comparing, sex with anyone but their spouse, and jealousy down to an art form.

In the midst of this mess, it is hard for me to grasp that Paul would call a time out to get all mushy about love. He saw how they needed to really get LOVE (a lesson we still need today), but he also wanted to offer faith and hope. Hope that though they were in a mess, it was not their final state. They could grow in all of the ways that we have looked at this month. Hope that Eden would be regained and this, this is not our best lives.

This is the dress rehearsal for the real show. Is the dress rehearsal as real as the “real” show? Yes, especially to those in the rehearsal. I don’t mean to imply that our lives now are not real or valid, they are. But our hope doesn’t lie in us getting it right.

And in Eden Regained we will know hope without the tinting of despair or doubt or brokenness. The slogan Keep Hope Alive resonated with many. What do we have without hope? Eden Lost.  This is as good as it gets, baby.

But when we are in Eden Regained, we won’t have to keep hope alive, hope will simply be alive without effort or assault.

I am drawn to hope like an annoying fly to light. My soul dances at the thought that illnesses can be healed, relationships restored, a day off enjoyed, a Broncos victory or chance to watch hope infused episodes of The Biggest Loser.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Hope is going to last – forever. Amen and amen and amen.

All the posts in the series will be added to this page each day of October. If you would like to receive these reminders in your email inbox, it’s easy! You can subscribe now by entering your email where it says “Jump into the Mess!” I am enjoying the journey together. Amy

Remember: Love, satisfaction, extravagance, freedom, belonging, recreation, truth, trust, purity, submission and power, unity, kindness, blameless, with abandon, acceptance, celebration, faith, generosity, joy, purpose, empathy, rhythms, hope.

p.s. I know there is a weird space in “with abandon” and after about an hour working on it and trying to figure out what is going on with computer code … I am leaving it “wrong” and living with, oh yes, abandon.