As I ran out of space on my last blog, here is part two, to be read in conjunction with part one…

It was partly Mike Tuffnell and Liz Clark who gave me the idea for this blog. In particular, reading Mike's blog on Job and how he went through such pain and such struggle, I felt something in me stir. Where is the hope in a world of seeming hopelessness?

What is my hope truly resting in?

Anyone can believe and have hope when life is good. It's what keeps us going, what binds us together as Christians, as friends, as families, as communities, believing in one another and having hope in the goodness of one another. That everyone can change, be changed, that things can be turned around with and through Christ, having the hope of Jesus.

But what about when life is harder, perhaps temporarily distanced from our friends, maybe even without any tangible evidence of God helping us? Can we still have hope and still keep believing then?

How do we have hope when things are looking bleak? Why isn't it easier to have hope then, to have more faith in God?

Well, the main reason I reckon for why God is sometimes so hard to discern is so that we build up a sense of trust and an ability to grow. This might seem paradoxical - how can we have hope in something invisible? Well, it means striking out with no relief in sight, following, trusting, hoping in the promises made that we can't see coming to pass at the moment and developing our character along the way.

Actually, it's all about our character. Rick Warren wrote in a recent email that all God wants for us is to develop our character. Our happiness has to be a by-product of our character development, not the other way around, because God wants us to put our hopes first and foremost in him and call out to him for our secret petitions, burdens and requests but then to wait …

And to me, herein lies the battle of hope, to hold onto and keep believing God despite what our natural senses tell us. Our challenge is to have the hope to wait for the day of God's favour.

I have never been one for having an enormous amount of faith. My mum and my brother both are massive faith-filled Christians but I have always struggled to put my hopes entirely in Jesus. My hopes then until recently mirrored my faith and where that was at any particular time but a few months ago, as I lay on my bed and cried out to God, seeing parts of my life fall away and feeling like I could not talk to anyone, I felt breakthrough.

For so long, I have related to characters like David, crying out to God, in the Psalms, ‘how long, Lord, how long will you hide your face from me?' It's as if David is saying, ‘when I need you the most, Lord, you hide your face from me'. And this is what I partly felt last summer, with the ending of a job and a relationship that meant the world to me. Have you forgotten about me Lord? But that night a few months ago, I came to trust God in a way that was, is, wholly outside of my control.

Turning back to the scriptures, I begin believing in what I read. It says in Psalm 37 ‘delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord and He will do this'. I felt God saying to me simply, ‘trust me. Put all your hopes in me and let's see what we can do together.'

And I thought why not? After all, when I have put my hope in other things, I have usually ended up disappointed. You see, the enemy is not terribly frightened by our own human efforts and we normally mess things up. But when we put out hope in God, something moves and the enemy is petrified.

It's for me personally a hope that things might change in my circumstances, with my writing and photography, that these might be recognised, that I might find one day a soul mate, that I might be given a real place that I can call home, but it's giving up to the Lord all these things and the right to them. That is so important because when we give these things up to the Lord, he gives them back to us but in a new and fresh way.

But we do have to give them up and the right to have them and, instead, put all our hopes in the Lord and just rest in this. Tell him everything that we need and let him do the rest.

And I believe today that everything that our hearts desire will be given to us if we submit our will to God but only if we believe. But this can only come when we submit to him and don't try and fix things with our own strength but instead, put all our hope in him. And even then, it's in God's time, not ours and it's this waiting that tests our faith and our hope in Jesus.

Because you see, as soon as we make this promise to the Lord, something will challenge this. To quote Oswald Chambers: ‘You see, every time that you venture out in the life of faith, put your hope in Jesus, you will find something in your common sense that flatly contradicts this faith, this hope in Jesus. Common sense is not faith and faith is not common sense. Can you trust Jesus Christ where your common sense cannot trust Him? Can you venture heroically on Jesus Christ's statements when the facts of your common sense shout “it's a lie�? On the mount, it is easy to say “oh, yes, I believe God can do it� but you have to come down into the demon-possessed valley and meet with facts that laugh ironically at your hope in Jesus. Every time my program of belief is clear to my own mind, I come across something that contradicts it. Let me say, I believe God will supply all my needs and then let me run dry, with no outlook and see whether I will go through the trial of faith, or whether I will sink back to something lower. Jesus said, “blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me�.'

And as I read this, I thought of St Marks in Tollington Park. There are ladies there in their seventies who have been praying since the early 1960s for a breath of new life to sweep over St Marks and an influx of young people to come in. They had the faith to believe and the hope to expect this, as God promised and yet I am sure during certain times, especially a few years ago when they had no vicar and hardly any congregation, they had to literally hang onto this promise, this hope that they had in Jesus because everything of the flesh, of the world, contradicted this. And yet now, forty years on, it has come to pass with Sandy Millar as head of the church, and God blessing their faith. Who knows why it took this long for their prayers to be answered but it's perfect timing for sure and St Marks is going to be a huge place of growth over the next few years.

And this was further reinforced by a book that I am currently reading by the head of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church in New York. A few years ago, he had to raise $6million to pay for a new building as his congregation had outgrown the old one. His natural inclination was to write letters, to make a million telephone calls, to try and raise this money off his own back and through his own strength. But while on a mission trip, he was told by God to just wait and to have faith and put all his hope in Jesus. The pastor's first reaction was the same as mine would have been, to try and fix it because how would waiting bring $6million in, but he obeyed God and then, the day that he arrived back in New York, he received two cheques from anonymous donors in the post, one for $1 million and one for $5 million. He had done nothing apart from trust God, put his hopes in God and see what would happen as a result of this.

And this dude reminded me of Abraham, who also had hope even when there was nothing to suggest that what he had been promised would happen, even when it looked impossible. It showed that true hope is about faith, about patience and about waiting on the Lord, knowing these promises that he has given us in the Bible.

And as I began reflecting on this, I thought of other examples. My brother when he was on heroin, in prison, far from God, as recently as 2001. We had hope that he would come back to Jesus, get off drugs, be okay but we didn't know it for certain but we trusted nevertheless. Nick is now married to a beautiful woman and living near Chicago and as full of the Spirit as you can imagine. That hope that we had was richly repaid in full by God because of our faithfulness and our trusting.

And then I thought of Mum and Dad. They had to have hope when they started a drug club for drink and drug addicts in their home, called FFF (Fun, Food and Fellowship). Inviting up to 40 complete strangers into the house once a week for a meal, to watch a film and a chance to get away from the ugliness of their life, a place where they would not be shouted at, where they would not have to squat, where they could just rest and eat and be for a couple of hours. Mum and Dad's hope was not only for protection against violence but hope in these people, of lives transformed.

It's about trusting God when we have no reason to trust. Believing in God when we have no reason to believe. Hoping through God when we have no reason to hope.

It's about hoping that the world will be okay, that people deep down are good, that hope is what communities need, nations need, that hope can - through Jesus - make the world a great place to live.

A hopeless situation is the one that, paradoxically, is the one that should be the most hopeful because when everything is stripped away, the true power of God can be revealed but only then, as I have found out living here in Oxford.

Personally, I do have hope in life even though everything is up in the air still a little. Because I have Jesus and I have the promises that he made to me in the Scriptures and I am holding onto these and that God wants me to be okay, more than okay in fact.