Unfulfilled Hopes?

As I write this, the country nervously waits for the 3^rd and final England match of the Football World Cup in South Africa. B the time you read this the England team will be on its way home or feeling extremely lucky to have scraped through into the next round.

As someone said to me before the whole thing began, the best time to be an England supporter is just before the first match, when hopes are high, dreams of victory are in the air and anything seems possible. But then the matches start and reality starts to dawn. Perhaps are dreams of winning were just that – dreams, and our hopes are dashed again.

But I suspect that these kind of unfulfilled hopes and dreams are not just the life of the football supporter. I suspect that most of us have these kind of high hopes and beautiful dreams in many areas of our lives. Who isn’t longing that this time that relationship will work out just right? Who isn’t hoping that this holiday will bring that longed for peace and inner refreshment? Who doesn’t yearn for something more, something better in the midst of their everyday life?

What do we do with these longings, these desires? Do we just squash them down and tell ourselves that we’re very lucky with all that we have. Is it just that we don’t know how blessed we are and we should be more thankful? Well, I’m not sure. Often it’s not that we aren’t grateful for all the good things that we have, it’s just that we’re longing for something more, something deeper, something more real, more satisfying, more lasting.

I wonder if instead of trying to squash these longings, we should embrace them. Perhaps they are in fact glimpses of eternity, the sighs of our hearts as they yearn for more than our world offers. They are the hints to something deeper; clues that life is not as it was meant to be, traces of heaven. We’re longing for life as it was intended to be, longing for that ultimate relationship – love as it was supposed to be.

Jesus said “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (John 10:10, the Message).  Jesus came to bring us real and eternal life, both now and after our time on this earth is done. But our experience of that life right now, while wonderful and exhilarating, is only partial. We still live in the reality of housework, bills, sickness, imperfect families and plain hard work. Our hopes are still partially unfulfilled. But we must not despair or grow hard, feeling that this world and its people will always disappoint. No, somehow we need to work out how to keep our hearts soft and open, turning those unrealised dreams into prayers and crying out to our Father God.