Face an uncertain future with hope

Our community faces a great challenge. Durango-Georgia, Camden County’s third largest employer has announced plans to close the paper mill indefinitely in less than two months. It would seem to some that the only thing certain in the wake of the Durango announcement is uncertainty.

There are many more questions than answers. The litany of things we do not yet know goes on and on. None of us can yet know the impact the mill closing will have on our community. It is precisely in a time like this that we can discover who you can really trust and where you can really place your hopes for the future.

            It is easy to put your trust in things you can see, feel, and touch. Yet, the Bible calls on us to place hope in the unseen future, trusting that God will hold us in the palm of his hand then as well.

            As Israel faced almost certain annihilation by foreign forces, the prophets called on the people to place their faith in God rather than in military might. The psalmist also wrote, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.” When Israel trusted in God and his commandments they were victorious, when they trusted in their own abilities, or the military might exemplified in chariots and horses, they were defeated.

Likewise, today when we put our trust in institutions, businesses, or other people, we will be disappointed. We are not the first community to face possible closing of a major employer whom the town could once trust to provide for its people. Employees could once trust their company to provide for them from hiring right out of school through retirement. However, placing your hope in a corporate strength is no better than Israel placing its trust in chariots and horses. If instead we put our trust in God, we will find our hope is not in vain, even when we can not see any reason to trust.

The Apostle Paul wrote to Christians facing persecution in Rome, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” That is the hard part—continuing to hope when we see no reason to hope.

Paul went on in the next verse to explain that through the Holy Spirit, God provides a way for you to experience the hope you cannot yet see. Paul wrote in Romans chapter 8, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

By “the saints,” Paul did not mean some long ago Christians now memorialized in stained glass. Paul meant all Christians, you included. God’s own spirit is interceding for you and your needs according to God’s will.

Then having told us that God’s spirit knows what we need and will pray for us when we don’t know how to pray, Paul wrote, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.” If all things work to the good, then God can use any tragedy, including the mill closing indefinitely, to accomplish good. It is not that God wants you to be unemployed or to live in uncertainty, but that God can take any bad thing the world does to you and create something good out of it.

            I do not know what the future holds for the Kings Bay area, but I do know God holds our future, so I do not have to fear. In the Bible’s understanding of the future, you find two clear choices—hope or fear. Looking to the future in expectation is not a neutral act in scripture. If you expect good things in the future you hope, which is closely related to trust. If, instead, you focus on uncertainties and look to a bad future, the Bible names that expectation fear.

            Place your hope in your own ability to control life and even the present will be uncertain and concern for the future will overwhelm you with fear and anxiety. Place your hope in God, who already knows the future, and you will have something real on which to base your trust. The hope of God is real. Experience it for yourself, and share it with others as we face this otherwise uncertain time together.

For all closely affected by the closing of the mill, I want to close with Paul’s prayer for the Roman Christians who were looking ahead to hard times, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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