Where Is Your Hope?

Marva Dawn contributed an article to this month's issue of Tabletalk, and she begins it in this way:

The story is told that a financially comfortable North American went to visit a mission church that was located in the village dump in a city in Africa. Wondering, he shadowed the pastor for much of the day until he finally burst out and said, “Where is your hope?” He could find no tools with which the pastor could work, no materials with which he could build, no food that he could pass on to the poverty-stricken people. “Where is your hope?”

To the man’s utter astonishment, the local pastor responded with an enormous smile and brilliantly bright eyes. “My hope is Jesus Christ,” he confidently asserted, and he went on the rest of the day showing how that could be the case.

Like the visitor, most of us living in North America can’t imagine how the African pastor could find hope in the terrible situation in which he worked.

It is little wonder, then, that Dawn is asking, Where Is Your Hope?