We are saved by hope

There's a lot of hate, a lot of anger in this country as I write this. Tuscon's shootings are just the very tip of a very large iceberg. I'm not telling anyone something they don't know.

Isaiah, the prophet from Judah in the Old Testament, lived in such a time. He wrote about that often. But he also wrote about a time, somewhere out there in a warm future that would change the frigid, angry time he lived in, when God would prevail, for Isaiah was smart enough to understand that only God could really change things.

In a famous passage, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing we can do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."

Isaiah put it this way: "Depend on God and keep at it because in the Lord god you have a sure thing."

I read a story yesterday that helps illustrate what hope is.

Time was running out, and Mark Dickinson wasn't sure whether he'd get to see his dying 2-year-old grandson one last time. A long line at Los Angeles International Airport's security checkpoint had kept him from getting to his gate on time. His grandson Caden would be taken off life support in a matter of hours in Denver, Colorado, with or without his grandfather's presence, according to CNN affiliate KABC. "I was kind of panicking because I was running late, and I really thought I wasn't going to make the flight," Dickinson told KABC. That's when a pilot from Southwest Airlines stepped up and held the flight at the gate until Dickinson arrived. The pilot was standing by the jetway waiting for him when Dickinson arrived in socks, so rushed that he just grabbed his shoes at security and ran through the terminal. "I told him, 'Thank you so much. I can't tell you how much I appreciated that.' And he said, 'No problem. They can't leave without me anyway,' " Dickinson told KABC.

It was just one person doing something for another person, but it flew in the face of what has become known as airline rage, that tendency to blow a gasket because of all the delays and adverse conditions at our airports today.

Isaiah said, "The path of right-living people is level. The Leveler evens the road for the right-living. We're in no hurry, God. We're content to linger in the path sign-posted with your decisions. Who you are and what you've done are all we'll ever want."

In a world in such a hurry, a world filled with those who are mad in every sense of the word, it is good to know that God waits for us like that pilot. "No problem," he tells us. "They can't leave without me anyway."