After Christmas each year I hear people say, "Well, it's time to get back to reality."  They say it with resignation, as if all the promises of joy, hope, love and peace that are at the center of the Christmas gospel are little more than a wishful fantasy, a pleasant dream, like sugarplums dancing in our heads.  They assume, albeit reluctantly, that the real world is the world about which we read in the newspaper every day; the world of terror, hurt, pain, violence, greed and war.  But people of biblical faith know that reality is exactly the other way around.  The ultimate reality, the reality toward which all of history is moving, the lasting reality that God will fulfill at the end of time, is nothing other than God's peaceful Kingdom, God's loving reign, God's gracious rule revealed in Jesus Christ.  Christian hope is not a wishful fantasy or a pleasant dream.  It is a complete awakening to the "real" world in which Jesus reigns and God is all in all.  The witness of those who have made the journey to the center of the faith is that it is a joy-soaked way to live, and it is a hope-saturated way to die!

Friend of Dial Hope, will you join me in becoming an incurable hoper, a hope-a-holic in this New Year of 2010?  Let us carry hope in our heart.  Hope is a song so deep within the soul that nothing, absolutely nothing, can drown out its music.

Prayer: Loving God, we live in an uncertain future.  Bless us so we may be a blessing to others.  So we go on... limping on... hoping on... every step a testament of perpetual gratitude.  Our hope is rooted in your promise... "I will be with you, always."  Let us carry that hope in our hearts through the long days and nights ahead.  We join our prayers for the men and women serving our country in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Be with their families back home and be with the people of those countries.  We pray that peace may come soon.  O God of grace and of all creatures great and small, we love you!  In Jesus' name. Amen.