Remember the "Occupy Wall Street" movement?  We have not heard much about it lately, but from what I can tell, its proponents and supporters continue to nurture it along, trying to sustain and promote the values they believe it was presenting.
     We likely have varying opinions on the Occupy Movement, and I will not try to take sides here.  I will say, however, that underlying this movement, as well as many of the protest movements currently erupting in Europe (and the Middle East) seems to be a pervasive sense of powerlessness.  Across the West, and many parts of the developing world as well, countless people feel as if they have lost control of their lives, that they no longer have a say in matters that affect their livelihoods, and that the politicians whom they believe ought to be helping them seem to ignore their plight.  They feel totally helpless.
     And perhaps they are.  The world, East and West, is moving at a pace that most people do not understand, driven by forces and directions few people fully grasp.  Many people are falling through the cracks, and many more people are awash in a grinding sense of physical and moral hopelessness.
     Regardless of what we think about the legitimacy of these feelings, we are safe to say that they are not going away any time soon.  People want a voice in the direction of their lives.  On the other hand, those who, at the moment--and only at the moment--possess power, must realize that they are only as powerful as God enables them to be (consider Jesus' words to Pilate that, "You only have power as my Father gave you"), and that despite the tremendous influence they may wield today, they are in the end very, very little people trying to shape a very, very big world.  Their time is frighteningly evanescent.
     Power is only as effectual as its ability to remember its true source.  Though we who are not powerful may feel at times as if we are hoping in nothing more than hope that the power structures will ever change, we can at the same time understand that hope would not be were there not a greater hope still.  There's more to power than meets the eye.
     Hope is only hope if there is a God.