On Christmas Eve this year I attended the church service for my church. I was dismayed to see slightly more than 40 people in attendance and even more so when I learned the first service had approximately 60 people. Before COVID you had to get to church about one half hour before the service started to assure finding a seat. How things have changed in so few years.
The homily concerned the birth of Jesus Christ and how he was the hope of the world. That begin to percolate in my mind. Rhetorically I asked myself is there still hope? Several days later I still don’t have the answer.
I look at how our society has changed, how our nation is being guided, how less and less people attend church or believe in God and it is discouraging. How can one have hope for the future when the children are being indoctrinated in behaviors that are contrary to the teachings of the Bible? How can one hope for better days when leaders make blatant misrepresentations to the citizens to maintain their positions of power? Hope dies in darkness and yet we see little, if any, light brought to bear by those entrusted with exposing truth to power. One can hope that our leaders will devote themselves to protecting our sovereignty as a nation, but that hope is being dashed upon the rocks of open borders and equity, inclusion, and diversity in our military as well as in most sectors of our society.
I hope for integrity, honesty, courage and placing the country before oneself to be present in our elected officials. But more and more we see blatant lying from those elected or seeking to be elected with no consequences as it seems to be taken for granted.
Our society has so many ills and yet we see little appetite for problem solving among the populace as well as those who lead. It is as though the citizens have become resigned to their fate of living in a country that is in a downhill slide with no one willing to do anything to halt it. How can one hope for better times in these circumstances?
I think we all must fall back on our faith in God and based on that we can hope for a better world. But it doesn’t seem that we can put much hope in those who lead to take us to a better place. They seem to have no inclination to do that but instead just to better their own individual circumstances to the detriment of the rest of us.
One hope that I do have is that I hope I am wrong.
— John Lengemann
Imlay City
