"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"

That’s a very well known phrase which tries to make us optimistic when everything seems to be going wrong. Take something sour and unpalatable and turn it into something desirable. I guess we all wish we could do that right now.

For many of us our Christmas celebrations had to be cancelled. Seeing family, many of whom we hadn’t seen for months, had to be put on hold and that glimmer of light we thought we’d seen seemed to be snuffed out. As we enter 2021, we continue to see uncertainty all around us.

In the week before Christmas I listened to an interview by the Archbishop of Canterbury in which he said ‘Christmas is not cancelled, just our Christmas celebrations; Christmas is a message of hope, of Christ coming into our world’. Christmas is over, we’ve started the new year and maybe it feels like another long, hard slog has become. However, hope is not just for Christmas. Hope is something we carry in our heart. Our hope is not dependent on our circumstances, nor on our feelings. Our hope is the result and the outcome of the Father pouring his love into our heart (Romans 5:5). 

We have lived through many months of loss, grief and hardship. But we can have hope, not in Governments or vaccines but in our Father who holds our lives in his hand and who carries us through all the uncertainties we face. It is the certainty of his love for us which is the only thing that gives us true hope.

My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the LORD.” Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” (Lamentations 3: 17-24 NIV)