Quotes about Hope

When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark.

And so, beginning with the early church, there is a long tradition of Christians who believe that God will ultimately restore everything and everybody, because Jesus says in Matthew 19 that there will be a "renewal of all things," Peter says in Acts 3 that Jesus will "restore everything," and Paul says in Colossians 1 that through Christ "God was pleased to . . . reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

We're here on earth, in these bodies, feeling the pull of gravity, knowing that we're only here for a while. But then there are these moments— like brushes or glimpses— of love and connection and hope, and suddenly we're here, and we're everywhere. Our feet are on the ground, but we're flying. Our hearts are still beating, but our souls are soaring.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live. What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

If you believe that you're going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.

This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again. They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

What new and good thing is going to come out of even this? When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.

Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

It's at the end of ourselves that new futures open up.

heaven has the potential to be a kind of starting over. Learning how to be human all over again. Imagine living with no fear.