“What’s that face?”“Turn that frown upside down!”
“Smile! It increases your face-value!”
I heard them all today. All said by well-meaning, truly caring people trying to cheer me up and bring me back to my “usual” happy self. But it just wasn’t working today. I just didn’t have it in me. What a way to start a post, huh!
Yet I think if we’re honest with each other, we’d admit it’s hard to keep our hearts alive and open, hopeful, when we experience so many disappointments and heartaches in the natural course of life. Oh, sure — we have good days, even awesome days. In those times it’s not hard to feel positive and upbeat about the future and walk in happy expectation. But where does that positive upbeat view of the future go when we’re hit with disappointment, setbacks, heartache, defeat, pain, loss?
I have learned that it is in these dark moments that hope can be most alive and real in us, if we will allow it. The kind of hope Horatio Stafford clung to as he penned “It Is Well With My Soul.” The same hope that Job clung to as he sat digging at his scabs, grieving his lost family and saying,”Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” (Job 13:15) And the same hope that kept a bloody, beaten Paul and Silas praying and singing to God while in prison.
I doubt any of these men were smiling, happy, or chipper during these dark times of their lives. And I would suspect their words were spoken, and lyrics sung, with tear-stained faces, and pain-filled hearts. Yet they all had hope.
Paul points out in Romans 8 that even though all creation is bound up in the curse brought on by Adam and Eve, subjected over and over to frustration and futility, and groaning with birth pangs, it eagerly waits for God to reveal who His children really are — and with that revealing be freed from its bondage to decay. What an amazing picture of real hope! If we couldn’t grab hold of it in the previous stories, we get another glimpse of it here, in a multi-dimensional view of just how gritty and sweaty and bloody hope really is.
We don’t see the happy sparkly thing we tend to envision when someone mentions hope. This isn’t a dreamy gossamer comforter that we snuggle into and feel all warm and happy. On the contrary, the picture Paul gives us is of a gritty bloody battle to remain open, alive, eager, patient, and surrendered to God in the midst of continual frustration, futility, curses brought on us by others, and deep searing pain. Real hope – especially for the follower of Jesus – means ferocious fighting of resentment, bitterness, depression, despair, and apathy. It brings a “deepened sense of thirst and ache,” as one of my favorite authors, Jan Meyers, put it, and leaves us on the verge of falling into the abyss, all. the. time. Real hope puts us in a place where we have to trust the all-sufficiency of Christ. And that isn’t an easy place for us. We naturally want to trust the sufficiency of ourselves. To trust in, rely on, and put the full weight of our lives in the hands of Someone we cannot see — it just goes against the current of of our nature.
I recently heard (in a teaching from Ravi Zacharias, I think) that “Abba” doesn’t mean “Daddy.” It actually means something a little more intimate. It was used by infants and toddlers when they wanted their father and is the equivalent of today’s “da-da.” So when Scripture tells us we cry out “Abba! Father!” what it’s really giving us a picture of is us crying out like infants, holding our arms stretched wide in a desperate longing for our “Da-da” to hold us and comfort us. Only children who have raw, gritty hope that da-da will respond continue to cry out and reach for him.
Today I keep running across things that remind me of this truth of what real hope looks like; perhaps because I’m struggling mightily with disappointment and regret that’s threatening to suck me into the deep chasm of despair. So I think I just need to write out what I keep hearing God say to me today, the Hope He’s whispering to my heart and soul: This isn’t it. This isn’t all there is to Life. I’m doing something you cannot see, cannot yet understand. Trust Me. Rely on Me. Put the full weight of your life on Me. I’ve got you. Will you yet hope in me?
Be strong and let your hearts take courage, all you who wait for and confidently expect the Lord. — Psalm 31:24 (AMP)
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