When It Doesn't Make Sense

“When it doesn’t make sense, hold onto hope.”

Loren Thornburg

I’m not usually one to follow all the ins and outs of a news headline but the news of Santa Barbara hits close to home.  I find myself reading article after article trying to make sense of it.  As a graduate of UC Santa Barbara there is something unnerving to know I walked those same streets.  It isn’t totally unfamiliar to me having been there during a similar killing by car rampage.  It’s hard to know what to do with events like these.  When the numbers become names it becomes more than another news story, but a real life tragedy.  It’s these moments that we are forced to look at what we do with life when it doesn’t make sense.  The thing I keep coming back to is that somehow hope remains.  I don’t know how it does it in the midst of such deep pain and suffering that continues to come at us on all sides.  Yet, somehow hope remains even when all seems lost.  So hold onto hope when nothing makes sense.  

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away…” 

1 Peter 1:3-4 NASB

God is a god of hope.  When nothing makes sense He is our reason that we can hope.  Peter is writing to a people in the midst of suffering and persecution, which he himself had endured.  So these words don’t come in the middle of good times but in the middle of really hard times.  They don’t come from someone unaware, but all too aware of the despair life brings.  Yet, that doesn’t change the reality of the hope of Jesus Christ.  Nothing can change the reality of our hope in Jesus.  We have such a real hope in Him that it is a living hope.  He is alive and so is our hope.  Our inheritance will not fade and neither will our hope.  God is unchanging and so is His promise of hope.  So we can hold onto Him, our hope, that never fades and never changes.  When nothing makes sense, even still, hope remains.