The current JBU theme of Living in Hope was chosen as an antidote to the sense of hopelessness that pervades Jamaica at this time.
As I was reflecting on this I came to think of my own experience growing up in Northern Ireland during what we call ‘the Troubles’. Most of the daily news would be full of paramilitary groups on either side of the political and religious divide, bombing or shooting members of the security forces, each other and sometimes innocent civilians. We lived in a time when police check-points were a regular occurrence, bomb scares were not an unusual disruption and areas of tension could easily flare up into violence. Now Jamaica and Northern Ireland are very different places, and most of the issues are not the same. However I was thinking of what it was like to grow up in a land that seemed so entirely defined by its problems. Those problems were so huge, so complex and reached so far back into our history that there seemed no way things would ever change.
As Christians across Northern Ireland we prayed and prayed, and claimed the promises of scripture, but if you’d asked me if I could really envisage it being different I would probably have said no. This was all I had ever known, and although I longed for it to be different it was so far out of the realm of my experience that I couldn’t imagine things any different than what they were. Thankfully we don’t have to be able to envisage it – because we have a big God. And that’s not what faith is about. Hebrews 11 v 1 tells us that ‘faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.’
It doesn’t matter if we can’t imagine what it would be like for God to heal our land. It doesn’t matter that we can’t imagine what it would be for God to transform our personal circumstances. Ephesians 3 v 20 speaks of our God as one who can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.” We have a big God and when we call on his name in faith he can transform even the most hopeless of situations regardless of how we see them.
When Northern Ireland finally had a power-sharing government of its own, the two men who first shared the governing duties were the embodiment of either side of the divide. As they were pictured together, shoulder to shoulder on that historic day, the front page of the Belfast Telegraph newspaper carried the picture with the headline ‘Miracle of Belfast’-and it really was, because we believe in a God of miracles.
So let us not be concerned with how hopeless the situation may look – for Jamaica, or in our own personal circumstances. We don’t have to be able to imagine what it would look like if things were different. We just have to keep asking, in faith, for God to change things, and then leave the mountain moving to him.
