Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.

• 1 Corinthians 13:13

Israel, put your hope in the Lord,
    for with the Lord is unfailing love
    and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel
    from all their sins.

• Psalm 130:7-8

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 5:3-5

My wife and I went to the wholesale warehouse store the other day to pick up prescriptions and to do some light shopping.

Wait!  This was the wholesale warehouse store!  How could any shopping there be “light?!”

I digress.

I went to the pharmacy and found that only 4 of our 6 prescriptions had been filled – computer glitches.  Now we had to “shop” for twenty minutes.  I found my Christmas present to myself, a boxed set of Hardy Boys mysteries, 21-30 at about half the price that I had seen online.  We got a new spice rack carousel with some interesting spices, but now we need to inventory the old spices and discard a few – a lot?

But on the way down the aisle to the spice rack, my wife found some interesting bowls.  I put them in the cart, but we had not gone 30 feet until she found other bowls.  I put the first ones back and got the ones that she wanted.  We seem to break bowls a lot, so I hope these are sturdy.  She called them her Christian bowls.  My first comment was that they were a poor excuse for Christian bowls.  “Where is the Hope?  How can they be Christian bowls when there is no sign of any Hope?”

Of course, there was no “faith” either.

For those who cannot read the words on the bowls in the photo, they are:  Love, Joy, Peace, Grateful, Happy, and Calm.  All nice ideas, but …

These are all good qualities, but without God, they are dreams of what might be.

And why these words?

• Love – noun or verb
• Joy – noun or verb, but I have never heard or used Joy as a verb
• Peace – noun, verb (as in “peace out”, for those who remember that), and an exclamation
• Grateful – adjective
• Happy – adjective
• Calm – noun, verb, or adjective

Would it not be better to have all as nouns or adjectives?  It just seems weird.  But gratefulness and happiness would be longer words, more ink, and for those with really short attention spans, they might lose their train of thought after two syllables.

But my wife liked these bowls and we got them.  And for me, they will be a reminder that the world thinks that they can get these and ignore God at the same time.

I may live a lot longer, but I may not make it to the point when this post comes out either, but I do not see us getting anywhere closer to those six concepts except as catch words on the side of bowls – if we do not have God.  But I can see all of them accomplished either toward God or His gifts to us (another reason for it being a weird collection of words).

Now, for the fun part.  We have used old German bowls for our soup for the past forty years.  My wife always got the owls, for being wise, and I got the lions, because I roar a lot.  The boys fought over the turtle, so that regardless of what soup they were eating, they were eating “turtle” soup, but the bowl broke.  That left a fish, a rooster, and a dove.

So, as we go into our next forty years of soup eating, which bowls will we gravitate toward?  I have a feeling that love, joy, and peace will be used more than the others.

But I suppose that I have answered my title question, without “Faith” can there ever be “Hope?”

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.