Showing posts with label Hope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hope. Show all posts

Monday, 1 June 2009

Hope for the hopeless


As I decided to call my blog 'hope transfigured' I ought to include a few stories of hope from time to time. Well, that's easy today because I've heard plenty. Let me share one. Early this morning I was speaking to a colleague, Helen, in Hong Kong who was very excited about a trip she had just completed. Helen is part of the leadership team of a mission group, which is part of Faith2Share, and they have been in Cambodia for the past week or so. In fact they were right up in the remote north of the country.


Genocide, on the scale it was practiced in Cambodia, does not make for hopeful people, even a generation later. However, Helen told me, in a few places attitudes are beginning to change, step by step. Christians are a tiny minority in this beautiful but disfigured nation, but they stand out as 'people of hope'. Now new opportunities are opening up for mission amongst familiies, healing wounds, caring for the rejected, loving the unlovely. These beginnings are only very small but Helen sounded very excited about what God is doing there and I shall be calling Hong Kong again soon to keep up with the next stage of this story. I just pray that I can 'live hope' in my own community as well as they do in Cambodia.

Tuesday, 24 March 2009

Journeying Backwards


I was asked today where my blog name comes from. Well you can blame Tom Wright - the one who is bishop of Durham. I could say that its all about soteriology being Christocentrically rooted in eschatology but that really doesn't help! Perhaps we could say instead that Christianity makes much more sense if you read history backwards - that us Christians are people of hope and that we are orientated towards the future because that's where we will discover who God really is and who we, in consequence, are. Help, that doesn't sound much clearer either. Why don't you just read Bishop Tom - he really understands it, and so did I after I read him. It's all in Surprised by Hope, Tom Wright SPCK 2007


So ...... inspired by Tom, I'm now walking backwards (guided by the historic events of Jesus and his church) towards all the things I dare hope for because of Jesus. And as I go that hope is daily transfigured (changed and strengthened) into something more certain. You must see - that's quite exciting! Hence the blog name.