Hope is Christ!

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This is Day 1 of my 40 day Lenten Blog.

The devil rules our world. Nothing can be more clear than that. Even those who believe him to be just an allegory, a symbol of darkness and evil must recognize that our world is full of such darkness and evil, fear and death. Insanity seems to be the order of the day. Chaos reigns in our world and even those who promise to bring order only bring more chaos.

Imagine being a child today. Imagine the confusion and fear they live under every day. They are told that there are no such things as boys and girls. They are told God is a myth. They are told that there is a deadly virus and if they do not cover their faces with masks they will kill their friends. They are told that they are destroying the Earth and they will not see adulthood before climate change kills us all. They are told that right-wing extremists or left-wing revolutionaries want to murder them, and that there is a crazy man in Russia who will destroy everyone in a nuclear war. If they are black they are told that they have no chance of making it in this world because the white people who are in charge want nothing more than to see black people fail. If they are white they are told they are nothing but racist devils, and though they have never done anything personally, the very color of their skin is evil. Children are taught that the other is always out to get them. Every day, children are taught fear, greed, hate, and selfishness. They are taught these things because the devil rules our world.

We all see this. We all see the fear, greed, and hate. After all we are all afraid of something, be it COVID, climate change, financial collapse, artificial intelligence, or a socialist revolution. And we turn to leaders to save us. We turn to Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, or Elon Musk, or Greta Thunberg. And when they fail or when they betray us, when they turn out to be no better than the hundreds of other failed leaders that litter the pages of history, we lose hope. We look around our broken world and we despair. We weep for our children's future. We weep for those dying from war, from disease, from famine, or simply from lack of clean water to drink. And we curse God because we believe all of this horror and despair is His fault. We blame Him for all the messes our own hatred, greed, and fear have caused. We blame God because we forget that the devil rules our world.

But the devil does not just rule our world. He rules our hearts, too. We feel hopeless because we refuse to turn our hearts to the One who can bring us hope. We search in vain for hope in the devil's world instead of turning our hearts to the true hope that exists in Heaven. I know it feels hopeless sometimes. I feel that hopelessness, too. I, too, want hope. But hope will not be found here in the devil's world. But I promise you there is hope. And that hope is Christ.

Over the next forty days I will share that hope with you. It is a narrative story, as all life is. It is the story of good and evil, of life and death. It is the Story of Ages, the greatest story ever told, the story of how the devil gained control of this world, and how Christ will liberate it once again. But most of all, it is the story of hope in a hopeless world.

Next: In the Beginning

R.C. VanLandingham is a Catholic homeschool dad just trying to make it through this life and into the next! He has written a Christian children's fantasy series about a boy named Peter Puckett!