(7) Acts of Hope

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Acts of Hope, originally shared on April 20, 2020. It was the seventh video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   I think that we are feeling that the novelty has worn off the consequences of the novel Covid-19 virus for our lives. We’ve even been experiencing some disorientation with regard to what day it is. I saw a meme a week or so ago that said, “Until further notice, the days of the week are now called thisday, thatday, otherday, someday, yesterday, today & nextday.”

   Many of us have experienced disruptions much greater than disorientation. Many of us don’t know how we are going to survive to next month, or even next week, or even to tomorrow. People are beginning to act from fear, just to know that someone sees them and hears their pain. Our social communities, large and small, friendships, families, churches, civil governments, are being stressed by social isolation.

   Sally and I want you to know that you are not alone. Though we are physically apart during this Safer at Home and Social Distancing phase of bringing the COVID-19 virus under control, we are bound together in the Body of Christ, the whole Christian Church on earth.

    We are not distant from one another when we are close to God.

   We are like spokes on a wheel, with God as the hub of the wheel.

   We want to encourage you to seek that relationship with God or to grow in it. Whatever the future brings, we know that God will walk through it with us.

   Last Saturday, our son James and I planted a Navel Orange Tree that Sally named “Apple” right here in our backyard.

   It reminded me of a quote attributed to Martin Luther, and to many others, "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."
   It's our small act of trust in God's future and our belief that, whatever is coming tomorrow, God calls us to improve the world by whatever means we can today.

   We want you to know that God is enough, and to encourage you to grow in your relationship with God, and to allow that relationship to direct you to where God has equipped you to serve others.

   Jeremiah 32:6-9

   Jeremiah is buying land when conquest and occupation by a foreign power is immanent. Israel, the northern kingdom made up of 10 or the 12 tribes after the nation split, was conquered by the Assyrian Empire in 722 B.C. and assimilated. The remaining 2 tribes became Judah, the southern kingdom, in 586 B.C. when the Babylonian Empire arrived and could be heard outside the gates of Jerusalem when God commanded Jeremiah to buy land and he did so. They took the remainder of God’s people into captivity for 50 years. It was an act of hope.

   Tom Hanks, in describing writer and director Nora Ephron, once said, “For a wrap gift, she would send you a note saying something like, ‘A man is going to come to your house to plant an orange tree — or apple or pomegranate or whatever — and you will eat its fruit for the rest of your days.”  Planting a fruit tree is an act of hope.

   Commit an act of hope this week. Do something that will last, or something that will only mature sometime in the future.

   Commit to the future, for we are called and equipped by God to use whatever abilities we have to make it better, more like the world God intended from the beginning of Creation.

   “You are not alone” is not a platitude. It’s not just something we say to ourselves to make us feel less afraid.

   It is a living reality.

   It is an affirmation of the presence of God in all who receive God into their true selves.

   It is this that I commend to you, a living relationship with the one true living God.

   It is streams of living water, the Holy Spirit moving through us to nourish and make us new.

    It is who we are in relationship with God, a gift from God to which we respond to in kind with acts of hope.