Hope over Fear

By Pastor Sunny

I said, “Joe, don’t do it.”

Joe was one of the guys on my college dorm floor. One day, as we were playing table tennis, he told me he was thinking about dropping out of school. He had just learned of an opening for a union job in the university’s custodial department.

For Joe, the prospect of a union job with good hourly wages, health benefits and pension sounded too good to pass up. The job market for new college graduates was extremely difficult in the late 1970s, and the thought of graduating with student loans was frightening to him. This opportunity, though it was not the career he envisioned for himself, offered something he desperately wanted: financial security.

Unable to shake his fear of not finding a job after graduation, Joe gave up his dream of becoming an engineer.

In Exodus 32, we find the Israelites giving into fear. Moses had been gone for forty days, and they didn’t know what had happened to him. Without Moses to lead them, they feared they would die in the wilderness. In their anxiety, they fashioned a calf, an image reminiscent of the gods they had known in Egypt.

They celebrated the golden idol they had made and declared that it was this god that had brought them out of slavery. Even though they had prayed to God for freedom for four hundred years, their fear drove them back toward the gods that had enslaved them. Clinging to the familiar, they lost sight of the God who was leading them on a new path toward a better future.

About a year later, I ran into Joe on campus. He wondered what his future might look like had he had stayed in school. I tried to reassure him that it was not too late to return, but he felt he could never give up the security of a union job. 

Having grown up only knowing the financial instability of a small dairy farm, giving up a sure thing to take a chance on an uncertain future was simply too much to ask.

We make countless decisions every day. Most have little or no lasting consequences, but some have significant impact on the trajectory of our future. Fear always pushes us toward the safety of familiarity, even in the jeopardy of the future. At times, we become so anxious about the path, we turn back from what we already know to be the better future.

Faith invites us to trust that God is with us even on the unfamiliar path.

May we trust in God's promises and dare to follow where hope leads us.

Pastor Sunny