(This message is part of our Imagining Abundance giving campaign. If you’d like to donate directly, you can click here to do so.)
Romans 8:24-25: We were saved in hope. If we see what we hope for, that isn’t hope. Who hopes for what they already see? But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience.
Where do you find hope? It’s a simple question, yet one that can be increasingly difficult to answer. Like hope itself, the quest for hope is both straightforward and circuitous, like a million mile journey that leads us home, often the most difficult to see when it’s most needed, and the need for hope as acute today as it has been anytime in many of our memories. The divisions among us are deep and seem to be growing deeper by the minute. Some days chaos seems too mild a word to describe the current state of things.
The Spirit’s invitation, offered through Paul’s words in Romans, calls us to be a voice of hope in the midst of the storm. And the hope offered isn’t a flimsy, greeting card hope, but the kind of hope that keeps us grounded in our individual and collective belovedness – hope that is free of naive projections and is, more often than not, borne out of and through the hardest experiences of our lives. It’s the kind of hope that has dirt under the fingernails, whose eyes have run dry through tears. It’s the hope that trusts and believes and stays grounded in the vision of a world where everyone is able to live into the fullness of who they are. Put simply, it is a hope that imagines abundance beyond the way things are and connects straight to the heart of who we are called to be as children of a God of infinite abundance.
Today is Giving Tuesday, an international day encouraging giving to non-profit organizations. As we lean forward into hope in this season of Advent, we are thrilled to share the More Light Board has offered to match every dollar donated to More Light in December up to $5,000!
Since our beginnings over 40 years ago, More Light has been about expressing hope for the world that is possible and working earnestly to bring that into being. Your donation helps create spaces where people experience the kind of abundant hope that can only happen when they are seen and loved in the fullness of who they are.
Whether you have $5 or $500 to give, your contribution will go to support this life-saving and life-giving work of bringing hope to spaces that need it the most.