Just finished washing the last of the Christmas china from my family dinner. Been collecting Christmas china since I was a teenager. Santa Claus brought me a hope chest one Christmas. A hope chest is a piece of furniture where young women collect items in anticipation of married life. I loved it. It sits at the foot of my bed now full of linens. I cut a photo of a small Lane cedar chest from a magazine ad and told daddy I wanted the chest for Christmas. My mother said daddy traveled all around to area cities and furniture stores looking for the chest. Santa always brought me a place setting of Lenox holiday china and I was excited about having a place to store my china.

I was so thrilled to walk into the living room that Christmas morning and see Santa had left the chest beside the tree. Vet brother called it my hopeless chest but I just kept on collecting china and eventually collected a husband to go with it. Chief loved beautiful china, too. When we visited Monticello, Virginia, we started collecting presidential china in the James Polk pattern. The flowers decorating the china are the colors of our dark mauve dining room walls here in Roanoke. Chief came home once from a business trip with several place settings of Franscian Desert Rose china he had seen in an antique store window and another collection began.

Several years ago I gave the Lenox Christmas china to my oldest son and his wife. My daughter-in-law sets a beautiful table with it on Christmas morning. I had kept on collecting china so I have several other Christmas patterns for my family dinners. I remember the last piece of the Lenox china I received from my daddy on his last Christmas. He gave me a large serving bowl. Mama was mad because it was so expensive. I loved it! A set of Christmas china I bought at the General Dollar store thirty years ago is my favorite now. A fat red cardigan sits on the snowman’s hat in the middle of the plate.

God gives us a hope chest of life and it’s our choice to decide what we pack in there. We pack our favorite thoughts of glorious happy days and our feelings of sad, lonely times, too. But God’s chest is overflowing with hope. Hope in the sunshine of another day is such a gift. Billy Graham writes that “true hope comes by trusting God even when circumstances are difficult.”

We need to pack our spiritual hope chest with faith. Bible scripture in Ephesians Chapter Six says we should pack the “full armor of God so we can stand against the devil’s schemes,” “the belt buckle of truth…the breastplate of righteousness, the “helmet of salvation” and the “sword of the Spirit,” to “extinguish the flames of the evil one.”

God has packed our spiritual hope chest with love and compassion, courage and wisdom, forgiveness and hope, and faith and peace. God is waiting for us to open our hope chests and accept his love and grace in our lives. God has everything we need for our journey through life, we just have to surrender to him and follow his commandments as he guides us to eternal life.

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” –Emily Dickinson