Hope

This week I have been struck by how much I need Jesus to return. (I am sorry I haven't been bloggin' very regularly - I have been SWAMPED and I normally blog at work, and work has been really busy! But I am getting DSL at my house this week, so I should be able to blog at home, and this will mean I can blog all the time! YEAH! - back to the regularly scheduled program)
I am taking eschatology this semester and I have been struck by how much of theology is structured around this word "hope." It seems as if all of theology is leading us to the point of the return of Christ! It is our understanding of God, Man, Salvation, the Church -everything....It is all based on the first and second advent of Christ!
I have realized that this places "hope" pretty high up on the Christian virtue list. I look around at the songs we sing, the shirts we wear and the talk we talk - and I don't see this virtue anywhere! I am amazed at how much we have forgotten the need for Jesus to return - without this, we are.....Stuffed! :)
As I look at our early church brothers and sisters, they let this fact govern most of the Christian disciplines - when they prayed, they prayed because Jesus had not come back yet, and they still had needs here on earth. When they fasted, they fasted because the Bridegroom was not present. When they sang, they sang as a foretaste of the praise around the Throne. When they read the Bible, they did so because the Word was not present with them and they needed the Spirit to reveal God through the Scriptures. When they gave "Christian love" it was because everything was not set right in the world because Jesus had not yet returned. Everything they did had this underlying current of "hope."
And as cool as this idea is - Paul says in I Cor 13 that there is "faith hope and love" and the greatest of these is "love." I have wondered why love is the greatest - and this week in class, I realized that it is the greatest because it is the only one that is eternal. Because at the return of Christ we won't need hope or faith because we will have seen Him for which we hope and Him in which we have faith - but love, it will remain!
So, no matter how important hope is to us right now, one day it won't even exist! And we will be known as a community of love!
I hope that I can make my life here reflect these virtues - love, faith and hope - in that order!