“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Jer 29:11
The verse appears on cross-stitch samplers, throw pillows and mugs. I even used it on a card to announce the (premature) birth of my last baby after a high-risk pregnancy. The verse is found in a letter the prophet Jeremiah wrote to the Jewish leaders of the exiles in Babylon. It is a message of encouragement during a time of struggle.
I wish that the verses that precede this one got as much airtime as Jeremiah 29:11 does. The prophet writes, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.”
Even though they are exiled, God encourages them to settle in and truly live there. He wants them to pray for the peace of the city where they are held captive, and to pray for their own peace. It is in the ordinary living of daily family life, that the Lord encourages them to pray — to seek him and find him. And finding him, they will find peace.
God isn’t offering them a golden ticket. He’s offering genuine hope. This hope has a full understanding of the burden of their life in bondage. God knows their struggle; God knows your struggle.
Hope isn’t the distant reach of rainbows. It is rooted in the real and present life we live here. While certainly we look forward to heaven, our hope isn’t only in heaven. Jeremiah told the exiles, and he tells us that God promises a future and a hope with the full understanding of how difficult it is to live a Kingdom life here on earth.
While he isn’t promising a life of comfort and ease, he is promising to restore the fullness of a prosperous soul. It will be a soul filled with grace and peace and strength. It will manifest the glory of God. We will be able to rise and begin again when we are crushed by adversity. So often, we hear about building resilience that we might believe that it is something we do under our own power.
Instead, consider that resilience is a by-product of hope. When we hope in the Lord — when we trust that he is always in it for our good — we can rise in the face of struggle and begin again.
A living hope is one that knows that Christ came and suffered, so he knows our own suffering intimately. Further, God tells us that hope grows in the context of our homes.
It is in making a home and planting a garden and growing a family that we see God building his Kingdom on earth. There is little on earth more hopeful than a family at home. True, that is where the struggle often lies as well. With the struggle, grows the hope. If we let it.
Hope is a theological virtue, a gift freely given by God. Hope is also a vocation, a call to live a certain way here on earth. We are to toil here with our eyes on heaven, knowing he has secured our future there.
Living hope means that we seek and find and give thanks for the goodness here and now, radiating the glory of a good God truly living in us. In a world full of uncertainty and hardship, the hope God offers is not just a promise for the future, but the strength to live faithfully in the present, finding peace even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
