NH 2026 SUNDAY EVENING CELEBRATION - RAFAEL MANZANARES

Hope is a gift from God.

We hope for things in our life.

We hope that the sun will shine.

We hope that our business venture will go well.

We hope that a marriage will go well.

We hope, and it is a tremendous gift of God.

And the Bible says that hope deferred makes the heart sick.

There are times where the things that we were hoping would happen, we were believing, we had good reason to believe that they were happening, they were going to happen, they don't happen.

And it can be a really traumatic thing that throws us, throws our life for a spin sometimes.

I'll give you an example, which I wasn't planning on sharing, but I, with my kids and my wife, we had booked for my in-laws to come and visit in Majorca from Italy.

I called my father-in-law and I said, I have checked you in.

I've sent you the boarding passes.

And we were excited the next morning to go pick him up from the airport.

Well, to our surprise, that same evening, I got a phone call saying, Tommaso has fallen down.

And he had a brain hemorrhage and passed away.

It was one of the hardest things in my life that I've ever had to do to go upstairs and tell my son Jonathan and Arden that what we were hoping for the morning was actually coming.

Not going to happen.

Jonathan feels deeply, my son.

And he immediately goes, what do you mean? And he cried.

But that's the depths of what's going on in the text that we read today.