Hope Springs Eternal
Hope Springs Eternal: I wrote it on a chalkboard, and I themed my artwork around the old adage that’s rolled off the lips of three generations of women in my family, at least. And this weekend I had the opportunity to share with two beautiful gatherings of women about the gift of hope, and the unlikely places I’ve discovered it. I’m sharing the transcript here for you, too.
Spring seems an appropriate time to talk about hope, and after a long snow-less winter, or any kind of winter, really, a day that can start with open windows and the scent of lilac wafting in feels full with promise.
I have known hope as a spring budding, a bird alighting, and I am familiar with hope as a marker of our faith as Christians. Throughout scripture we are exhorted to put our hope in God (Psalm 42.5), in His word (Psalm 119.74), in His unfailing love (Psalm 147.11). We are told that Christ in us is the hope of glory (Colossians 1.27) , and that at the end of the day, there is faith, hope and love, love being the greatest of these (I Corinthians 13.13).
But the truth is, the lush beauty of spring, the life pulsing out of the dirt and the blossoms unfurling, they are here, in part, because of the hard cold of winter. The beauty we see now was beneath the soil in stark December. Under the lifeless dirt of February, life was being sustained, and growth is bursting forth now because of the cold, the dark, the quiet.
Dormancy is necessary.
And just like we can’t talk about spring blossoms without the reality of dormancy and germination and pruning and deadheading, we cannot speak of hope without mentioning it’s dark underbelly.
In Romans 8, Paul talks about the hope in which we were saved, the promise of our adoption as children of God, and the redemption of our bodies. He says: “Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?”
It’s simple logic, and we all know it deep down.
We hope for light because there is darkness.
We hope for more because there is not enough.
We hope for peace because there is conflict, war.
We hope for healing because there is sickness, death.
Hope is only possible against the backdrop of longing, the reality of grief, the heaviness of loss.
Romans 8 goes on to tell us: “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
In Bread for the Journey, Henri Nouwen asks:
How do we wait for God? We wait with patience. But patience does not passivity. Waiting patiently is not like waiting for the bus to come, the rain to stop, or the sun to rise. It is an active waiting in which we live the present moment to the full in order to find there the signs of the One we are waiting for. The word patience comes from the Latin patior which means “to suffer”.
Scripture promises that suffering, the underbelly of hope, will be part of our journey.
Romans 5 says that:
Since we have been justified through faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith
into this grace in which we now stand.
And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings
because we know that
suffering produces perseverance;
perseverance, character;
and character, hope.
The suffering itself is a means by which hope is revealed in us.
I have witnessed this in my own heart, the hope growing out of the heartache, in the grief of loosing my sister, and the slow healing. {Click here to continue reading…}
Many of you know that two years ago, in the midst of our relocation to my hometown, my oldest sister passed away, unexpectedly and tragically.
Two years have passed and I still struggle with the fact that I will never know the hows and whys of her last moments, only the date her body was discovered, and the finality of her death. In the months following this loss, in a new home, with two small children and no new church family or close friends nearby, I discovered an ache and a grief I had not known.
I have stood before many of you and spoken and written of God’s goodness, and His love, but in those dark, isolated days following Jeannie’s death it was my own voice that taunted me. All those words and lessons and heart-cries about the God who is always about the work of making new, restoring and redeeming: they blew up in my face.
Because death is pretty final, and there was no redemption story here. And that grated against all my understanding, my deepest hope, the very foundation I’d laid my life upon.
And I made it through the difficult words of well-meaning folks and I made it through the eulogy, and I spoke the truth that seemed to mock me: I said it through tears, that her life was complicated, but Jesus’ relentless love for her was constant. And I longed to believe.
But I spent every night for I don’t know how long, slipping out of bed, so my husband could sleep, only to wake him with my uncontrollable sobbing. Those months were the darkest of my life. Quiet, full of silent ache. I kept it bottled up inside, until I couldn’t keep it up, couldn’t stand the tension of a heart desperately clinging to hope in a God who redeems, and mocking itself for doing so at the same time.
I was curled in a ball in the corner of the upstairs bathroom the night I caved. When I admitted I just couldn’t work it out, that her death and the ache that now lived inside of me was too much to reconcile, I thought my world would split apart.
But, friends, the opposite happened. Not in that moment, and not by any certain magical formula. But months later, I would sit, weeping again, always the tears, and tell a friend how the very redemption that I had shaken my hand at heaven and demanded, a glimmer of that redemption was unfurling right in the midst of my brokenness. The words shocked me as they rolled off my tongue, and rung true to my core…
{Next week I’ll share rest of my little talk: three gifts I discovered during those difficult months, that planted hope in my heart. Read it here.}
*portions of this transcript were originally written & posted on my dear friend Lindsey’s blog. You can check it out here.
