Becoming a People of Hope in the In-Between

What anchors us when the waiting is long, and the horizon feels further away than it did?

A PERSONAL REFLECTION

One of the biggest challenges I faced in thirty years of ministry was loneliness.

My husband and I entered church leadership with full hearts. And like most leaders will tell you, it can become a profoundly lonely place. Not because people aren’t around. You are constantly surrounded by people. But when your energy is poured out toward others, when your role requires you to hold space rather than take it up, you can find yourself on the margins of the very community you are serving. Present in every room but belonging fully to none of them.

And I learned something through that season, I haven’t forgotten that loneliness is one of the strongest drivers of hopelessness. When you are genuinely disconnected, beneath the surface of busyness, something dims. What kept me anchored wasn’t a private discipline, though those mattered. It was the shared expectation of the gathered community, the corporate, embodied trust that Christ is at work, that he is right now making all things new. I found it in the songs we sang together, in sermons that cracked something open, in watching the church reach toward justice and compassion in costly, beautiful ways. In those moments, something in me that had started to shrink would quietly expand again.

That shared expectation was hope. And it was a hope I could not have sustained on my own. But lately, and I say this with both honesty and concern, I am sensing that communal expectation is declining.

You are not imagining it

If you’ve felt a kind of collective weariness lately, not just your own private tiredness, but a sense that something in the shared atmosphere has shifted, and you are not alone.

Research confirms what many of us feel in our bones. A 2024 survey found that while most people hold hope for their personal lives, two out of three Americans believe their country will be more divided and less hopeful by 2050. One major global workplace study described our current moment, plainly, as a “hopelessness epidemic.”

63%	Of people across 31 countries say their country is on the “wrong track,” essentially unchanged year over year. Not a passing mood. A settled feeling that something is broken at the level of our shared life.

And what drives it? The research points clearly: not poverty or political upheaval alone, but disconnection. The slow erosion of belonging. The World Health Organization now classifies loneliness as a global public health crisis. We are living through what researchers call a “meaning crisis,” the dissolution of shared narratives and rooted communities that once held communal hope in place.

And this is the world the book of Revelation was written in.

A letter written from the in-between

John was writing from exile on the island of Patmos, cut off from the churches he loved. The communities he wrote to were under real, grinding pressure: economic exclusion, social ridicule, the relentless demand to conform to Rome’s story about who held power and what the future looked like. Many were wavering, and hope was thinning.

“I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”

REVELATION 1:9

Notice how John opens. He opens by placing himself beside his readers. I am your brother. I am in this with you. The patient endurance required right now, I am practicing it too.

And then, from that place of shared solidarity, he pulls back a curtain to show them what is already true behind the visible surface of a world that looks like it’s running on its own steam.

Hope has a different name here

Here is something striking: the word “hope,” the Greek word elpis, does not appear once in the book of Revelation. The most hope-saturated book in the New Testament never uses the word. John doesn’t write about hope. He enacts it. He gives us visions instead of arguments, because hope at this depth is not a conclusion you reason your way into. It is something you see. When you understand what hope means in the biblical languages, this makes perfect sense. These are not words for wishful thinking. They are words for confident certainty held in taut, active patience:

Qavah A cord pulled tight, the sustained tension of waiting for what is certain to come

Yachal Patient endurance, staying steadfast in faith when the promised thing is not yet visible

Elpis Not a wish but a confident expectation, something is coming, anticipated with certainty

Biblical hope is not optimism. Optimism is hostage to circumstances because when things go badly, it collapses. But hope anchored in what God has already done and already declared. That holds, even in the in-between.

The throne is not empty

Revelation chapter four opens with a door standing open in heaven. And the very first thing John is shown, before anything else unfolds, is this:

“There before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.”

REVELATION 4:2

The throne is occupied. Before a single seal is broken, before any suffering is addressed, John is shown this. Whatever is happening on earth, God has not vacated. History is not ungoverned. The most powerful force in the universe is not fear, not division, not the erosion of hope in our communities. It is the One who sits on the throne.

Then, in chapter five, something I find very moving: a question goes out, who is worthy to unlock the meaning of history itself? No one is found. And John, the old pastor on the island, weeps.

I understand that weeping. It is the weeping of thirty years of ministry. It is watching people suffer without resolution, communities gather but feel hollow, hope deferred until it starts to feel like naivety.

But then an elder touches John’s shoulder. Look. And when John looks, he sees a Lamb. Slaughtered. And standing.

“Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne.”

REVELATION 5:6

Slaughtered. And standing. This is the grammar of Christian hope, unlike anything else in the world. The one who died reigns. Defeat was the form of victory. And what erupts in response is not a private sigh of relief but a cosmic choir:

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”

REVELATION 5:12

This is communal hope at its most fully realized, voices finding their bearings by saying the true thing together, out loud, in each other’s presence.

Why can we not hope alone

This is what my thirty years taught me, what the research confirms, and what Revelation is structured to demonstrate: communal hope is not a bonus feature for the spiritually advanced. It is the oxygen that keeps the flame alive.

The great hymns of Revelation, “Holy, holy, holy,” “Worthy is the Lamb,” “Hallelujah,” were not written for quiet time. They are the songs of communities who have seen the throne room and practice saying so together, week after week, until the vision becomes more real than the empire’s relentless alternative narrative. The act of gathering, singing, breaking bread, and speaking the truth about who is on the throne is not merely devotional. It is subversive. It is the church’s prophetic act against a world that has forgotten where history is going.

“When we worship together, we are not just expressing what we feel. We are practicing what is true, until it becomes more real to us than everything pressing in from the outside.”

If communal hope is declining, and I believe it is, the most urgent response is not more content about it. It is to gather. Really gather. With honesty, depth, and shared purpose. To practice the vision together.

The present tense of hope

Near the very end of Revelation, after all the visions and beauty and waiting, a voice speaks from the throne:

“He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’”

REVELATION 21:5

Not “I will make.” Not “one day, when everything is sorted.” I am making. Present tense. Active. Now. The renewal has already begun. New creation is not a distant destination; it is the direction of reality pressing into this moment from a future already secured by the Lamb.

And one verse before, the most tender image in all of Scripture:

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

REVELATION 21:4

Your tears: from the lonely years, the disappointments you don’t speak about in public, the ones still forming, are known. They are held. And there is a day when the hand that made the universe will wipe them away.

That is what we are living toward. And it is already breaking in, in every act of reconciliation where bitterness would have been easier, in every community that gathers honestly, in every gesture of compassion that costs something real. These are signs. Evidence that the Lamb is still at work, still making things new, right in the middle of everything that feels like it’s unraveling.

Don’t just sit with it, do something

The in-between is not a holding room. It is the space where hope is most necessary and most possible, because we live after the resurrection and before the full consummation. The decisive victory has been won. But hope was never meant to stay in your head or your quiet time. It is embodied, practiced, and shared.

Three things to do this week

1. Name it out loud. Text someone today and tell them one place where you see God making something new, however small. The act of naming hope in community is itself a prophetic act.

2. Commit to gathering. Not just consuming content but actually showing up with your people. Decide now when and where. The vision of Revelation is held by communities, not individuals.

3. Speak the true thing. In your next gathering, whether church, small group, or a conversation with a friend, say out loud: the Lamb is on the throne. Say it like you mean it. That is how Revelation’s hope was always meant to be transmitted.

“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.”

HEBREWS 6:19