Hope: The Feast and the Foretaste

Let’s not make our faith in the shape of a perfect life. Instead, as Hannah Miller King suggests, let’s invite it to offer hope despite shattered dreams.

Elisa

Hope: The Feast and the Foretaste

By Hannah Miller King

Beginning in high school, I developed chronic back pain that progressed into my early twenties. I visited an array of doctors and tried numerous treatments, exercise regimens, and dietary tweaks.

Nothing brought lasting relief. My aches and pains were well known by my church friends and prayer groups. “How’s your back today?” they’d politely ask as I fidgeted in my chair or stood up to stretch awkwardly in the corner.

“About the same,” I’d respond.

By halfway through seminary, the pain was so intense that I was often in tears by early evening. One Sunday in December, I was sitting (uncomfortably, as usual) in church when I felt prompted to ask someone to pray for my healing. But the thought of asking again, and hearing no again, seemed almost unbearable. I didn’t know if I could handle the rejection.

When I finally did muster up the courage to ask a volunteer to pray for me, I downplayed my request. “Please pray for my back,” was all I could say.

To my surprise, I was healed that morning.

Twelve years and three children later, the chronic pain has not returned. I do not know why my prayers were answered that day and not in the years leading up to it. I do not know why my father’s prayers for healing from cancer remained unanswered despite our many fervent requests when I was a teenager. These experiences don’t add up in a neat, mathematical equation. They illustrate the tension of our time: the “already-not-yet” of God’s Kingdom on earth.

At the Communion Table, my unanswered prayers find a place as well. They are caught up into the collective longing of the church throughout history that prays, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

Our experiences of persistent grief help us get in touch with the fact that right now, we feast in Jesus’ absence. We celebrate the start of new creation, but we still live with the shadow of death until he returns to wipe every tear from our eyes.

Whether we gather for worship under the threat of persecution, in the fresh wake of a national tragedy, or in the quiet pain of personal loss, we gather as those with visceral awareness that the story of redemption isn’t over yet. Our present pain teaches us to yearn more sincerely for the day when Jesus will set things right. In this way, unmet longings don’t hinder our faith, they enhance it. They release us from the pressure to look or feel as if we’ve “arrived” at complete wholeness, and they increase our desire for the sustenance God has provided in the meantime.

In a world obsessed with eradicating discomfort, the Lord’s Supper is prophetic. At the Table, we name the hunger that cannot be fully satiated here and now. The meal that feeds us is both a feast and a foretaste. When it’s presented as a version of the American dream, in which prosperity can be achieved through adherence to certain maxims, Christianity falls flat. There are better ways to get rich or stay healthy.

But when our faith sustains hope despite short- term disillusionment, we learn a way of being in the world that is rooted in the next one. “The world to come,” as the Nicene Creed describes it, is the world we humans are looking for. We won’t create it through human collaboration or the right politics. We can’t protect our personal versions of it from tragedy or loss. And even when we try, we can’t entirely snuff out our God-given belief that it exists and is our home. C. S. Lewis calls it our “inconsolable secret,” this desire for a “far-off country” that haunts the religious and nonreligious alike.

At the Lord’s Supper, we taste the food from that far-off country. We bear witness to the fact that there is another world in which the dead are raised and the impaired fellowship of humanity is restored. Right now, we only see a glimpse of these things.

We practice resurrection by moving our bodies toward a Table, brushing elbows with other hungry and homesick bodies. Maybe those other bodies offended us in this past week. Maybe our relationships are strained. As a pastor, I have learned that this is more often the case than not. Every Sunday at church I see couples who are struggling to stay married or to stay connected with their kids. I see extended family members on opposite sides of a generational debate. I see colleagues who fell out at work but are working to restore their friendship. They all come, as I do, in need of supernatural help.

In the present world, our communion—with each other and with God—seemingly hangs by a thread. Sometimes it is completely invisible to us. But because Jesus has already been raised, it is a thread that holds. In him, Scripture tells us, all things hold together. And by him, we are fed: not abstractly, but concretely. In our great vulnerability, we hold in our hands a small, tangible reminder of the One who is in fact holding us until he comes.

Adapted from Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King. Copyright (c) 2026 by Hannah Miller King. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

Hannah Miller King is a priest and writer in the Anglican Church in North America. She writes for Christianity Today and serves as the associate rector at The Vine Anglican Church in western North Carolina. She is the author of the recently released book, Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness. She and her husband, also a priest, have three children. Connect with Hannah on her website.