Hope, the weary world, and yonder

ornament created by Marie Kitchings

My gaze fell on a nativity ornament in a market--handmade, and inscribed with the words, “The Weary World Rejoices.” Feeling a bit of the weary world myself, tears welled in my eyes as I recalled the words before and after that line in “O Holy Night:” “A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”

“Where is yonder?” my son once asked when he was only a wee one. A relative had told him in our southern vernacular to go in yonder and fetch a cookie for her. I showed him where the cookies were and wondered how he had never heard that word before.

In challenging times, we too, may ask, where is yonder? In the broken, hard edged, and sometimes heart-breaking world in which we live, we long for that new and glorious morn. My phone has often dinged this week with prayer requests for folks going through the hardest of times—parents who have lost a child and others suffering life-changing illnesses.

Yonder is not a place like a cookie jar, where we just take off the lid and find it, but it is hope that helps us find the wonder of it by faith, because Jesus has indeed come. Jesus is with us. In our weariness, we may rejoice because that new and glorious morn is always breaking in, if we only have eyes to see. In my mind I picture the weary world latching its gaze on the promise of the gospel, its chest expanding with the intake of Holy Spirit breath, and exhaling disappointment, loneliness, hurt, pain, despair, and grief, then letting go a great Hallelujah!

During this season of advent, we celebrated the first Sunday this past weekend with the theme of hope. And as we lit that candle, we remembered there is coming a day when yonder will be present in a way we have never known before when Jesus returns a second time and sets all things right. We long for it in one way, and in another, we seek to live out our calling in this day we are given today.

Friends, may hope and the reality of that new and glorious morn be yours here . . .  and yonder, too.

 "But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me"(Micah 7:7).