I guess it’s obvious if you look at my “Category Cloud”–scroll down the sidebar on the right–that Amy Carmichael is indeed a present and favorite author of mine.  She has been consistently present in my life for many years.  When I pause to consider why, the reason is simply because reading her has always fostered great hope in me.  She helps me to be a witness to hope.  And so I quote her often in my blog in the hopes that she will also foster hope in you.

Rom 15:13 says: 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.

Amy begins her reflections on this verse first by looking at some other verses in Scripture, verses that seem contradictory and surprising: In Lk 22.28,  Jesus says: You are those who have continued with me in my trials.   Yet, just a few hours later, he says: Could you not watch with me one hour?  And then (Mt 26.56): Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.
     Another set of conflicting verses:  In Jn 17.6, Jesus says to His Father: They have kept Your word.  Yet we know differently–as is so evident in Lk 22.24, describing their activity right after the institution of the Eucharist (!) (but who am I to judge?!): A dispute arose among them, which of them was to be regarded as the greatest.
     And so Amy wonders: How could Jesus say: They have kept Your 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, 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 [intently 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, p. 145)