Justin Welby Instagram – We often talk of Christmas as a time of hope fulfilled. In the birth of Christ, as the famous carol goes, ‘the hope and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.’ But Advent is the time before that hope is fulfilled – the time when our hopes have not yet been answered, and yet we are challenged to continue hoping. During the talks on Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles, a British Minister involved was asked, ‘Minister, are you optimistic?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but I am hopeful.’ Vaclav Havel, the former President of then Czechoslovakia, said, ‘Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.’ Hope is the quiet certainty that, in Christ, all things will, one day, be made right, even if we don’t know how yet. Optimism depends on ourselves. It looks inwards. It believes that we can fix things. But when things don’t turn out exactly how we want, it can lead to despair. Hope looks to God alone. In him, all our hopes will be fulfilled.