Sometimes, “that Friday feeling” means we feel the pressure lifting as the working week draws to a close and we eagerly anticipate the space of the weekend just ahead.
But sometimes, Friday comes at the end of a long, hard week, with a long, hard month and maybe even a long, hard year before it. On these Fridays, it can be hard to be optimistic; perhaps the best we can hope for is to feel a sense of relief that we’ve made it through another week.
People find all kinds of ways to motivate themselves: things will be better when I have more money, when the kids are older, when I have a new boss, when I can afford a holiday, when I finish my studies. I’ll feel so much better if I can just lose a bit of weight. Or if only I can kick that bad habit I’ve been feeding for years. Or maybe I’ll win the lottery.
The thing is, with each problem we solve and each challenge we manage to tick off our list, another one tends to come along. It’s a bit like playing the children’s game Whack-A-Mole: each time you bash one mole on the head and make it disappear, up pops another one in its place. If we pin our hopes on these kinds of milestones, we end up always living for the next holiday, the next achievement, the next promotion, the next success. This is an elusive and fleeting kind of hope. It gets very tiring, I can tell you.
No, I need something much more substantial and reliable to set my hope on. Something that doesn’t depend in the slightest on how well I perform, how I feel or what I achieve. This is what I’m setting my hope on today:
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come,nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 8:38-38)
Happy Friday, people.
