Author: Emily Chase

We are now halfway through Advent! Are you ready for another devotional thought about HOPE? Hope can be a very abstract concept. It is all very well to hope for something that will occur far in the future and even have faith that one day it might come to pass, but what about the situations …

Thank you for returning here for another installment on our Advent study of HOPE. Christmas is full of laughter and lights, shopping and songs, friends and family, but it is not a joyous time for everyone. So many have lost loved ones this year to COVID, including me. Grief is a strange critter. It sneaks …

Thanks for coming back to learn more about HOPE through this Advent series of devotionals. Did you ever make up a Christmas wish list when you were a child? Most of us grew up also making a wish before blowing out the candles on our birthday cake. As we go through this study on hope, …

We are not even halfway through Advent! Will Christmas ever arrive? I “HOPE” so! When you were a child, did you ever make construction-paper chains to count down the days until Christmas? You knew the days would eventually pass and Christmas would come, but did it seem like the days could never go by fast …

Here we are together again to learn something more about HOPE in this Advent series of devotionals. A friend of mine had to spend Christmas in jail last year. At the time, I couldn’t imagine how difficult that was for him. To have been condemned in a public court of law, to be far from …

You came back! Thanks for joining us for Day 8 of these Advent devotionals on HOPE. People know that my husband died of COVID this year. They seem to walk on tiptoe around me, expecting me to take the role of grieving widow when in reality, most days I am fine. Yes, I have down …

With so few Christmas parties and concerts this year due to COVID, my desire is that these brief thoughts each day during Advent continue to focus your thoughts on HOPE. Over the past few days, we have seen the negative side of hope: the results of false hopes, false assumptions about hope and false sources …

Welcome back for Day 6 in this series of Advent devotions on the theme of HOPE. Over the past two days we have looked at false hopes and false assumptions about hope, and today we’ll see one final false premise regarding hope: Some people look to the wrong source for hope. In the Old Testament …

Welcome back to Day 5 on our journey exploring the Advent theme of HOPE. At the memorial service for my husband, my son-in-law Anthony shared his memories of being a student in Gene’s classroom. Anthony explained that sometimes as he listened to lectures from his professors, he would hear them say something that did not …

Hello to all those joining us today for the first time. We are on Day 4 of our journey through Advent focusing on the theme of HOPE. For months the news of COVID deaths – of which my husband Gene was one – has cast a dark shadow over our land. Churches and schools have …