Advent Guide: You BelongSample

The Hope That Never Gets Old

New beginnings give me hope. My family has had a lot of them.

Twenty-nine years ago, my wife and I began a new family. Christine and I were young, poor, and naive. But mostly hopeful.

Twenty years ago, we welcomed our first child into the world. It was Christmastime. Driving by the nativity on the lawn of Baylor Hospital on the way to the delivery ward, Christine felt a special kinship with Mary. Hoping she could endure the pain. Hoping her child would change the world for the better.

This year, we sent that same child back to college for her junior year and sent her younger brother along with her. As they launch out on their own, we're hopeful their young lives will make an impact, and that they'll walk with Jesus, the Giver of hope.

And we're hopeful for our own new season. Everyone tells us the empty nest is hard. We think it'll be a lot of fun. At least we hope so.

It's easy to be hopeful when things are new and full of promise – new families, new life, new seasons. I think that's why Christmas is such a hopeful time. It's a celebration of new things: a new star, a new baby, a new covenant, a new chapter in God's relationship with humankind.

But here's the thing about new things: they don't stay new. Our marriage is worn (Christine has learned how hard I am to live with). Our kids have made mistakes. The empty nest is too quiet sometimes.

And that's why now, two millennia after the first Christmas when the news about Noel seems more than a little stale, we can remember that there's another new beginning right around the corner – one that never ceases to be new.

As the Pevensie children discovered in C.S. Lewis' classic books, God's newness never gets old, and never stops being hopeful. The Book of Revelation tells us about the next Advent when, like those Narnian explorers, we'll find ourselves, "beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

Ryan Sanders is commentary editor at The Dallas Morning News, a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, and a former pastor. He lives in Irving, Texas, with his wife, Christine, and their Beagle named after Scout Finch.

Don't forget to check out the weekly activity available for this week in the digital Buckner Advent Guide.