First Candle: Hope

Advent is the season of the Church Year in which Christians celebrate the coming of Christ.  Instead of nine candles in the Menorah, there are five candles in an Advent wreath and each candle stands for some idea, person, or event that differs among the churches. 

Jubilee House Community Advent celebrations 1980s

We hang banners we made in the 1980s with Community members who lived with us then.  They are worn and tattered…and loved.  We try in the wind to light our wax covered Advent wreath and we sing…all sorts of songs at all sorts of tones and volumes. 

Our first banner and candle stand for HOPE.  This works well with Hanukkah…Light is a symbol of hope.  The light at the end of the tunnel.  The candle in the darkness.  The first rays of the sun in the darkest hours of the night. 

Yet…Real Hope is not always found in the light.
 
Real hope comes not from seeing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel...it comes in the darkest of night…it comes in the times of most despair. 

 In the early days of our work with the poor, Mike and I had a seminary professor, Don Coffey, who gave me a piece of advice: “God will accomplish what He wants…just remember it will only be in His time…for example God will say, ‘I am going to break this boulder,’ and then will send a drip.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  In time that boulder will break…it will…but just not in my time or your time.”

And so for ten years we worked with the battered, raped, and homeless in the States.  Drip.  Drip. Drip.  And not a dent in the rock of poverty. 

Photo by Paul Dix

When we moved to Nicaragua in 1994 we desperately needed the hope we had found in the Nicaragua we had visited in the 1980s…they seemed to have taken a sledge hammer to poverty…But in 1994 in the aftermath of the Contra War, we found a whole country of battered and raped people.  Hope was in short supply. 

 But Hope did reside in at least one man, César Fajardo, who despite fighting in the insurrection against Somoza in his teens, investigating human rights violations by his own people in his twenties, and losing his chance of overcoming poverty with the end of the Sandinista Revolution, he still had Hope…enough to believe in our work and become our Director of Projects. 

We work with people who have Hope, who believe that good will win in the end.  And for us when we see real Hope…well we too can only believe… 

The boulder will break.  It will indeed. Hope.                   

-Kathleen