There are many forms of loss that people may experience:  loss of a job, financial security, health, loved one, and many others.  While any of these losses might be devastating, I think there is no loss so great as the loss of hope.   The loss of a job still leaves the hope of starting a new one, or even restarting in something new.  The loss of financial security may be somewhat more difficult to overcome.  It requires some form of safety net or the extensive help of others to overcome.  In many cases overcoming financial loss becomes overcoming embarrassment, the embarrassment of admitting personal insufficiency, or the need for outside help.  In our contemporary times, loss of health can often be combatted or overcome, and even when it cannot, the resources are available to minimize the challenges one might face.  The loss of a loved one may be one of the most difficult to overcome,  but life continues on holding out the hope of new connections, new relationships.  Where hope still remains, other losses are endurable.  But when hope seems to be gone, it is difficult to navigate a way forward.

Many people believe that hope is gone, and the choices they make based on this hopelessness are varied.  Many of those choices can lead to a downwards spiral of self-doubt, self-destruction and deeper hopelessness.  But what other choices are there when loss is so deep?

I think few of us can understand the deep sense of loss that a group of eleven men and an unknown number of women must have felt nearly 2000 years ago, when someone they dearly loved and someone in whom most of their hope had been placed was seemingly lost to them.  Their sense of loss went beyond a loss of hope for the future, it also made the past three years of their lives seem worthless and meaningless.  (A feeling that might feel familiar.)  It took a shocking, nearly unexpected miracle to turn their fear and hopelessness into joy and hope.  Jesus appeared after the resurrection first to some women, then to the gathered 11 disciples, then to hundreds in various places, before ascending to heaven.  It’s amazing the difference one moment of real hope can make.  Eleven men who were fearfully hiding, uncertain of what the future might hold, changed.  The full drama of the change that started three days after their hope had been crushed, took about 40 days to fully show.

Yet it need not take this long for you today.  The apostle Paul, a former antagonist of these 11 men and all those who followed Jesus wrote to the members of the churches that met in Rome: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?  As it is written:

For your sake we face death all day long;

we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (NIV Romans 8:35-39)

When hope seems gone God is still there. He is still there holding out His love, holding out hope.