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Hope on the journey

Lynne Baab • Tuesday October 21 2025

Hope on the journey

In 2010 and 2011, I had a strange medical adventure: weird symptoms, months of medical tests with nothing of note, then healing through prayer by a team of church elders. After that miracle of physical healing, the only one I’ve ever experienced, you’d think I would have been euphoric. Or filled with faith, hope, and love from God. Instead, I felt numb and hopeless, such a weird response.

I decided to start a “hope project.” I bought myself a ring with anchors on it. “This hope we have as an anchor of the soul” (Hebrews 6:19). For the next year, I watched for every mention of hope in Bible passages, hymns and praise songs, and poems. At the end of the year, I could say that our hope as Christians is grounded in Jesus. Frankly, that’s about all I could say.

Locating my hope in this beloved person, Jesus Christ, has helped me focus on the beauty of Jesus’s interactions with people in the Gospels. I have grown more in love with Jesus, surely a good thing. But the concept of hope has remained vague and unclear for me. For a decade, I have assumed that I just don’t understand much about hope, and that’s okay.

The other day, a friend and I were talking about hope. I found myself saying some things I didn’t realize were inside me. I said to my friend, yes, we Christians hope for heaven. In addition, on our journey with Jesus, we also hope that our pain will result in at least a few good things in the long run. We hope that the Holy Spirit is working in us to transform us into the image of Jesus. After that conversation, I thought of a few more things that we hope for on the journey. I’ll give you the scriptures that have been floating around in my mind since that conversation.

You may think that the scriptures below relate primarily to trust and belief. Perhaps they do. But in our desire to trust God and believe in Jesus’s presence with us and his promises to us, we also engage our hope muscles. See if you agree with me.

1. We hope that Jesus is making our faith grow as we run the race of life, trying to keep our eyes fixed on him.

“And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2).

2. We hope that the Holy Spirit is strengthening us when we are weak. We hope the Holy Spirit is praying for us when we don’t know how to pray.  

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” (Romans 8:26).

3. We hope that all of the events on our journey are working together for good.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

4. We hope that God will bring good things to us even when we experience pain.

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:1-5).

5. We hope that we will experience feelings of belonging in Christ's body, among people who care for each other and serve together, using our unique gifts.

“For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.  We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us” (Romans 12:4-6).

6. We hope that one day God will destroy evil.

“Let all creation rejoice before the Lord, for he comes,
    he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
    and the peoples in his faithfulness” (Psalm 96:13).

7. We hope for a redeemed world of healing, restoration, health, joy, and beauty.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2). 

Maybe these ideas and scriptures have brought other scriptures to your mind. What do you hope for? Which sections of the Bible help you hope? What encourages you to hope and enables you to wait for what you hope for? What do you do when it feels like your hopes aren’t coming true?

Here’s what I long for:

 “I have calmed and quieted myself,
    I am like a weaned child with its mother;
    like a weaned child I am content.
Israel, put your hope in the Lord
    both now and forevermore” (Psalm 131:2, 3).

Jesus, teach us to hope in you. Grow our hope. Comfort us when our hopes don't seem to be coming true.

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My new book is available in paperback and for Kindle. The title is Almost Peaceful: My Journey of Healing from Binge Eating. I describe the book and why I used the word "journey" in the subtitle here.

Next week: Try softer on the journey. Illustration by Dave Baab. 

Related posts:

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