Wishing Is NOT Hoping! … Hello Hump Day readers. As we countdown to Christmas, listening to the songs of the season and those assuring words from Jesus: peace, love, joy, and hope, I wonder if we look at each one of these words and ask ourselves “what does that mean to me?”

The other day I spoke to a very nice lady who works at Aldi’s. I asked her if she enjoys working for this company. Her smile melted quite quickly. She said that her kids don’t live close to her anymore and her husband passed away a year ago. She didn’t need to go to work but she did need to be around people. Then she said to me “there are wonderful people I work with, but I still feel so hopeless.” We talked a bit and then I went out on a limb hoping that maybe I could pray for her. Her smile came back and she said “oh please, I need it.”

Eugene Peterson, who translated The Message Bible, had so many talking points and ideas about people, our lives, etc. One of his studies caught me and still does because he pointed out that what a lot of people call “hope” is really something completely different. He wrote that “It’s wishing–NOT HOPING! Wishing and hoping are not the same thing.”

Then he went on to say “Wishing is something all of us do. It projects what we want or think we need into the future. Just because we wish for something good or holy, we think it qualifies as Hope. But we are wrong, it does not qualify as Hope. Wishing extends our egos into the future, but Hope grows out of our faith. Hope is oriented toward what God is doing; wishing is oriented toward what we are doing.”

He continued this line by saying: “Hope means being surprised—because we don’t know what is best for us or how our lives are going to be completed. To cultivate hope is to suppress wishing and to refuse to fantasize about what we want but live in anticipation of what God is going to do next.”

After I read his thesis on Hope  it changed my perspective and I found myself looking more to God rather than what my heart and my head wanted me to do! It changes you when you realize what Hope really means. Your focus is not on yourself or the ideas that you can swirl around thinking “I am going to try this, maybe I will feel better, find friends and enjoy my life.” But we lose something so precious when we take that path because it is not God’s path, it is not God’s Hope for us, and now we are “stuck” as Eugene Peterson would say.

Psalm 39 was written by King David. Using Peterson’s translation we call the Message Bible, we read verses 7-8: “What am I doing in the meantime, Lord? Hoping, that’s what I’m doing—hoping that You’ll save me from a rebel life, save me from the contempt of idiots.”

Peterson also has a good reminder for us: “When Christ came into the world he was the Messiah people hoped for, but not the one many wished for. If most people had their way, Christ would have been born in a grand palace—a place fit for a king. But God had other plans and those plans included Christ being made low, born in a humble stable.” In other words, God wanted his Son to be with us, live among us—his children who needed then and still today to have Hope for our lives.

So let’s remember that we don’t have a Savior who looks down on us from high. We have a Savior who became like us so that he could save us. Immanuel came exactly as he planned, not in splendor but in humility. The blessing is this: he fulfilled Hope — not a wish! AMEN.