Some mornings it’s hard for me to choose which gem to share with you.  .  .  but this is the one that I finally decided upon.  It’s another from Amy Carmichael.  She looks at how Jesus always had hope for His disciples, and so this is true for us as well. She’s commenting on Romans 15:13: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

     These words have often helped us to go on hoping for those who were disappointing us.  But this morning they came differently to me.
‘Ye are they which have continued with Me in My temptations.’  A few hours later — ‘Could ye not watch with Me one hour?’  Very soon after — ‘All the disciples forsook Him and fled.’
‘They have kept Thy word’ . . . ‘There was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest’ –this had happened only a little while before.  And yet, so perfect was the understanding between Father and Son that He does not explain–to the Father the all-knowing Son says, ‘They have kept Thy word.’ How could He say it?  What does it mean to us?  Just this: Our Lord of Love, our blessed Lord Jesus, looks upon us with such loving eyes that He sees us as we are in our deepest, lowliest, holiest moments, in those hours when, like John, we lean upon His bosom, and He speaks to us, and we all but see His face.
He knows, as no one else can know, the deep longing of our hearts.  He knows, as no one else can know, how far we fall. ‘Not as though I had already attained–He knows that; but ‘I press on’–He knows that, too.
The love of the Father has the same golden quality of hope. ‘The God of Hope’ hopes for us, even for us.  He never loses hope.  He accepted the word of His beloved Son: ‘They have kept [intensely observed] Thy word,’ in spite of times when they had seemed most grievously to disregard it–when for example at our Lord’s own table they strove about the dreadful matter of pre-eminence.  The God of Hope saw what they wished to be, what they yet would be.  And He looks at us like that.  Is there not something in this that touches us to the quick?  How grieve a love like that?  And is there not encouragement, too, for the strengthening of our souls?       (Edges of His Ways)