May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 15:13 (NIV)
Someone Asked This For You
Two women who have been friends since their twenties spend a December afternoon working through a shoebox of photographs, and most of the afternoon goes to one picture and the question of who’s standing in the back row. One of them is certain. The other one is certain of a different man, then laughs at herself, because the man she named would have been about four years old.
This sentence gets spoken over Gentiles and God’s own people together. Paul has been stacking up quotations that put the nations in with Israel, finishing with Isaiah, where the Root of Jesse springs up to rule the nations and the Gentiles put their hope in him. Then he prays for them.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul says it over them the way you’d say something at a door to somebody on their way out.
The work in it belongs to God. He does the filling, the Spirit supplies the power, the people he’s praying for trust him, and the overflow comes out of all of that rather than paying the way in. Nobody in the sentence is told to generate hope on their own first and bring it along.
So it’s a sentence you can say over a woman who can’t say it for herself, on a day when hope is the exact thing she doesn’t have and can’t be talked into. I’ve read this prayer for years and I still can’t tell you what overflowing looks like from the inside. The picture is a container filled past the line on purpose, with the excess going somewhere it wasn’t poured.
They find the name in the end. It’s written on the back in pencil, in handwriting that belongs to a woman neither of them can ask anymore.
A Prayer to Remember
God of hope, we’d put a name in front of you tonight if we could do it without embarrassing her. She’s run out. Fill her first, ahead of us, and fill her past the line. We’ll take whatever comes over the side, and we’ll believe the part about overflowing when we see it on her face.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
