The Bread that Fills

"For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently." Romans 8:24-25

          Imagine sitting down to a meal, a meal that’s taken time and care to prepare and to present, and after saying a word of thanks, everyone reaches for something before them. Right then, someone at the table says, “OH! The bread is still warm!” Not rolls that were sitting in a basket for an hour. Not a loaf that got pulled out of the breadbox. But bread fresh from the oven — still warm, still fragrant. You watch it coming around the table and when it comes to you, you ask for butter.

          This is the experience of hope. Hope is something that is shared and it is still warm, comforting, expressing the heart of the one who prepared it. True hope is the anticipation of getting something real, that makes our mouth water, that we expect we’ll see in our hands. It’s not something we have yet but it’s coming.

          And the thing about hope being shared is that it immediately becomes greater than just our own experience of it. It leads us into joy that someone else gets to have it, to join us in the life it brings.

"As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?" Psalm 42:1-2

Hope in Advent is the warmth of God’s presence that we find in the life of Jesus

and the promise he lived into our existence, the promise that displayed the worth of our souls to God. God wants us to find him and to be with him forever. He wants to nourish our souls with a deep relationship with himself.

          Jesus said,

          “… I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Matthew 6:25-26

In Jesus’ time, 70% of the nourishment regular people got was from bread. It was

the part of a meal that was needed every day… our “daily bread.”

Hope is something we need to sustain us every day. And the hope we share with others comes to us as if we are watching it being passed around the table and on its way into our hands. “For in this hope we were saved.”