Hope is hard to come by during the "winter" seasons of your life, like the loss of someone you love. Sometimes someone close to you dies suddenly, and the grief is almost unbearable. You are overwhelmed.
You are able to talk about the hope factor when your life is anchored to a personal relationship with the one who created you. You can know that death cannot ultimately win. Death is reduced to being a painful interruption. It can be very painful, but only an interruption.
In 1 Thessalonians 4:13 of the Word of God, it talks about those who have already died. It says, "We do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men," listen to this, "who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him." Verse 17 says, "We who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with those people in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever." Notice it says "...we do not grieve as others who have no hope."
The winter will not last. The reunion in the spring is sure to come and will last forever. This is because Jesus died to remove the great separator of sin; the sin that separates us from God and from each other. Jesus conquered death the moment He walked out of His grave. He assures those who belong to Him that they will share His victory over death. Jesus is the living Savior who gives eternal life to those that are His.
So what is hope? It's the confident expectation that there is something better than this. It's what gets you through an otherwise depressing winter. There will be a spring. What you see isn't what you get! Maybe it's winter for you right now. The pain, the struggle, and the wounds are very real. If what you can see now is all there is, the outlook is bleak, but this is not all there is if you belong to Jesus.
The Bible describes it this way, "Christ in you, the hope of Glory" ( Colossians 1:27). Do those three words describe you in Jesus - Christ in you? Your relationship begins the day you do what the Bible says, "To all who received Him, to those who believed in His name He gave the right to become the children of God" ( John 1:12). As the Bible asks so beautifully, "If God is for us who could be against us?" ( Romans 8:21).
If you're short of hope, there is Jesus. The very hopelessness of this winter you are in could be the very thing that drives you to His waiting arms and to the hope only this living Savior can give. With Jesus you can live in real hope. The confident expectation that there will be something better than this is guaranteed by the Son of God Himself. He will bring the spring.