High hopes

I remember as a youngster hearing the Frank Sinatra song High Hopes. It seemed to be such a cheerful hopeful song

‘Cause he had high hopes
He had high hopes
He had high apple pie
In the sky hopes

But I have found that having hope gets your hopes up and it’s part of the human condition to feel that you are going to disappoint yourself. This is a fear of failure, fear of us not being able to measure up. But I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to continue to have hopes but to just look at the things that happen to us not as success or failure but as testing a hypothesis or collecting data or just results. We can never really know the power of a God conversation or an invitation, even if on the surface it looks bad. The martyr Stephen witnessed to the leading Pharisees of his day before he was stoned to death in the presence of a murderous young man called Saul who was going to become the man who was going to plant churches and write a substantial part of the New Testament. Have high hopes and invite someone to take a closer look at Christ and his church.

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