Desperate Hope

Over the past two years I have experienced a complete shattering of many things in my life, not least of all my reality. As life has ebbed and flowed, my hope has not floated but drowned. Leading me to the profound conviction that if I despair it means I have placed my hope in the wrong places. This is not to say that I should not have felt pain or grieved the loss of certain things and dreams, but in grieving I should have been held together by my hope in Jesus. Like the song says “my hope is built on nothing less then Jesus blood and righteousness”, only my heart has been tossed and torn in the torrential down pours of life and my hope was (and sadly still is in some ways) built on something less. So many things have brought despair, even deep despair. I have found myself with Job crying out against God and his injustice, with Jonah crying out against to do what He is supposed to, crying out with Ecclesiastes against God and the meaninglessness of this life he gave me. In light of my life the Proverbs seem at best a cruel joke, they have taken on a sarcastic tone as if to highlight the misery of life. But there is hope, hope in Jesus, and when I wait on it I find strength. Living in a world run by money, as a Christian who knows that one day there will be no rich and no poor, why should I not desire to see no riches and no poverty in this life here and now. Of course, Jesus's point that we will always have the poor with us is because sin is the root of poverty and oppression (not necessarily the sin of the person suffering, and in fact more likely the sin of the person with money) and unless we can abolish sin we can not abolish poverty, but we fight against sin so why should we not fight equally as hard against poverty? Even if the pains of this world continue to deteriorate God’s good creation, we must hope. Recently I heard Brian Walsh give a lecture and he was asked if he was optimistic at all, he answered “no, optimism is not in my vocabulary but I am hopeful”. Optimism is built into the myth of progress who is modernity’s god, but true hope can only be built on the person of Jesus and the Kingdom of God. Easy to say, but when I have gone through hard times I continually asked how can I really find my hope in Jesus. Hope has always felt like the struggle, to hope means to fight, to do battle, to not give up. As the Holy Spirit has been convicting me about my despair and where my hope actually lies, He led me to this amazing verse that I think has become the picture of the anchor of hope in my life.

Isaiah 30:15
In repentance and rest is your salvation,
In quietness and trust is your strength

Kind of subverts the empirical or crusader mentality of salvation and hope. I find my prayers are turning more and more to the language of trust and rest, of letting go; the act of submitting to Jesus and following him into and through struggles and defeats. Hope in Him is powerful, it’s a way of connecting with the eternal so that we can fully engage in this world but live as new creations in it. There is a beautiful prayer that I have in Guerrillas Of Grace, since I first began to think about our faith and call in light of the idea of identity it has been a powerful prayer for me to turn to and so I turn to it again, may this quietness and submission give us strength.

In The Silence, Name Me

Holy One,
Untamed
By the names I give you,
In the silence
Name me,
That I may know
Who I am,
Hear the truth
You have put into me,
Trust the love
You have for me,
Which you call me to live out
With my sisters and brothers
In your human family.