When
I was young, family vacations meant camping and fishing. Singing songs by the
campfire, roasting marshmallows, sleeping under peaceful starry skies, reeling
in the big one. Sounds too good to be true, right? For some families camping
might have been the perfect get-away–but not mine. The reality of our annual camping
trips was anything but peaceful. We never really sang by the fire (argued yes–sang, no), I always burned my marshmallows, it always seemed to be raining and
no one ever caught the “big” one. But it wasn’t the wet sleeping bags or the
mosquitoes or the arguing that I hated. It was the fishing.
I
remember one of the first times my dad took my sister and I out on the lake to
fish. It was exciting putting on the orange lifejackets, making sure the tackle
was secure and going out on an adventure with my dad. He rowed us out to what
I was certain was the middle of this unending lake. To my young mind, every
stroke of the oars propelled me into the unknown. The bow of the boat easily
slicing through the still, glassy water–the adventure had begun. Then, all of
a sudden my dad said, “We’re here” as he dropped a small but heavy anchor over
the side of the boat. We’re where? Why have we stopped? The adventure has just
started. We spent the next three hours sitting–sitting! And did I mention
that we weren’t supposed to move or talk?
As
the minutes painfully stretched out, I grew to hate that anchor. It was
preventing me from gliding; it was holding me back from soaring, and it was
definitely keeping me from my adventure. So you have to understand that when I
read that God’s hope was an anchor, I didn’t jump for joy.
Hebrews
6:19 tells us “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure”
(NIV). This anchor holds us–attaches us. Jeremiah Burroughs, who wrote on
hope in the 1600s, defines hope as “the grace wrought in the heart by the power
of the Holy Spirit, whereby the soul quietly waits for and expects the future
good that God has promised in the covenant of grace, though there are many
difficulties in the way to hinder the accomplishment of it[i].”
He further explains:
They
do not have so much need of it in calm weather…now in times of greatest
opposition and of greatest temptations there a Christian casts his anchor, the
anchor of his hope and there he sticks.
There
the soul is kept from being hurried up and down, and carried away to split upon
the rock of such a temptation. His hope holds him fast[ii].
Hope keeps us from being carried away–a sure
attachment. Grounded and secure, we endure the waves and storms of life. This
anchor does not prevent or hinder us, it allows us to soar.
- from the soon to be completed The Human Hope Shift
