What does hope mean to you?

Is it a feeling, a wish or an optimistic attitude?  Like ‘I hope I win the lottery’?

Or is it something entirely different? The supernatural, the miraculous, the child who should have died who lives.

This type of hope defies science and logic and mystifies ‘the experts’ with unexplained outcomes.

An incredible recent example of this hope has been the story of 13-year-old Kiara Mun-Gavin, who was in a car crash in Durban on Christmas Eve.

She suffered severe brain damage when a motorbike collided with the car she was travelling in.

Doctors initially gave Kiara just 48 hours to live, and if she survived they predicted she would be in a permanently vegetative state.

While her parents, well known Durban North pastors Jaci and Richard MunGavin, prepared for the worst, they also cried out to God for a miracle.

People from across the country and the world joined them in prayer. Her friends occupied a room in the hospital for a week, praying in shifts for her full recovery.

Jaci, who writes a popular Christian and parenting blog (www.jacimungavin. com), wrote this on December 30:

“On Christmas Eve, while Kiara was having her first brain surgery to remove the fragments of bone in her brain and reconstruct her fractured skull, my husband and I came home to reassure and see to our other daughter and five young sons.

“We tucked them into bed and lay waiting for the call that the surgery was over. Richard went back at 1am to receive her out of surgery while I stayed home with the sleeping children. It was a moment of reckoning with God.

“It was nine hours after the accident and the first time I was alone. I cried out to God, desperate, on my knees on the bathroom mat.

“I clung to my Bible and begged God to give me a Word. Psalm 37:3 says, “Fix your heart in the promises of God.” “But what is your promise, God?” I pleaded. Psalm 37:7 “Quiet your heart in his presence and pray; keep hope alive as you long for God to come through for you.”

Jaci clung to the promise with all she had. #KeepHopeAlive has subsequently traveled around the world with Kiara’s story and here too, a great many Dolphin Coasters have been sharing her story.

On January 1, eight days after the accident that was supposed to be the full stop in Kiara’s story, she was successfully brought out of her coma.

Within days she could say a few words, do simple puzzles and even point her toes (a significant feat for the aspiring ballerina).

She has continued to astound her doctors ever since. Now she is out of ICU and she can walk to the bathroom, use a knife and fork to eat her dinner, and string sentences together.

Her father Richard writes:

“This is God displaying His healing power in a very real way.

“I’ve just heard of another doctor who operates in the hospital who saw the multitudes of people praying in those first few days and tried to find out what was going on.

“He wanted to tell the girls who were praying to go home and not waste their time because the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

“He clearly has not met my God!

“He has subsequently said Kiara has defied medical science. Of course she has. Because God is the giver of life.”

This hope that Kiara and her family were and are fully invested in was clearly not mere wishful thinking.

That type of hope is not based not on myself and my own puny understanding of the world. It is anchored in the place where heaven meets earth, ‘a confident expectation of what God has promised.’

I share this with you because I believe that life without hope is devoid of meaning.

Without it the troubles we experience would be too much to bear.

If 2019 is to be characterised by anything, let it be to #KeepHopeAlive.

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