Processing with God: Narrative Lectionary, Liturgy, Prayers
Hoping for Hope
Do you have hope? I asked one of the mental health patients on my ward, way back in Seminary as a I served my clinical unit.
No, she said, but I’m hoping for it.
God, you know how many times I have been in this position, hoping for hope.
I don’t have the hope yet. There are too many uncertainties, but I’m hoping for it.
Because God knows, God knows that we don’t have enough in place for us to be hopeful yet. God knows the illness, inequities and sheer number of existential crises that are going on right now.
But, you also know, God, that the Holy Spirit comes for us with radical changes in the crux of her very being.
So today, I will look for the Holy Spirit: for inspiration, encouragement, and yes even hope embodied.
Because even if I don’t have it, maybe I can at least recognize it along the way.
I’m just here, hoping for hope God.
So that is my prayer, that I can continue to hope for hope.
Amen
Image an original mixed art collage “Hope for Jan 20th” by Bea Stenta
Feel free to use or share with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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katyandtheword 
I love that phrase, “Hoping for Hope”. Thank you