I once heard a friend say, “in the first year of my
marriage, I felt tricked by God. Marriage was nothing like I thought it would
be. So I resigned myself to living in a loveless marriage for the rest of my
life.”
I’ve been there. Not just in marriage, but in most areas of
my life. When it becomes clear my expectations will not be met, hopelessness
floods in. I feel this pressure, this crushing weight. Then I go out and look
for a NEW compelling reason to keep on keeping on (in whatever I’m trying to
do).
But in my experience with God, that margin-less,
bone-on-bone despair is rarely the end. More commonly, it’s the beginning. In
one of life’s great ironies, the moment I resolve myself to a bleaker existence
than I’d expected, the clouds begin to part a bit. Maybe the honest expression
of despair can be cathartic like a
good cry. (Certainly I know people who get stuck there for years and I’m not
saying that hopelessness itself is healthy.) But sometimes I think the only way
we can get back to hope is if we come face to face with our “worst case
scenario.”
Maybe that’s why the prophets of the Old Testament were so
ballsy in the way they proclaimed judgment. God knew he had to paint the
bleakest possible picture to force them to acknowledge that their situation was
serious and all their best efforts would prove fruitless. So even Isaiah (the
hopeful prophet) says to one leader, “You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to
heaven’… but you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.”
To be shamelessly cliché… I suppose that when you’re in the
pit, the only place you can look is up. The pit is where reliance is experienced, not just conceptualized.
It’s a place of vision and resurrection.
So in the case of my friend, she fell in love again with her spouse, though it had
seemed impossible.
In my case, I’m getting to the end of my rope. I’ve tried
about every good idea I had to fix myself, my kids, my wife, my marriage, my job,
my life… and I’m discovering I’m a crappy fixer. Desperate, I’m beginning to
turn to others for help in an uncomfortably vulnerable expression of need.
Last week after a stressful night of trying to fix and
manage and control (and generally making things worse, I looked at my wife and
shrugged. Smiling, I said, “Well Debra… I’m broke. I’ve got nothing left to
offer.” She hugged me, and I did something I never do. I buried my face in her
shoulders and sobbed. She held me there for a long time, accepting me.
Despair forced me into vulnerability. Vulnerability opened
the door for acceptance. And I’m becoming convinced that the experience of acceptance is the single
most healing “stuff” in the universe.
Sometimes, Christians offer cheap hope. I grew up around
Christian radio, and music, and churches, which talked a lot about new life and
hope through Jesus. But they didn’t talk much about pain or failure or despair.
They fashioned themselves “hope brokers” and tried to win people to their
religion by being “positive and encouraging”. For some people life itself had
furnished all the reality they needed and little bit of hopeful encouragement went
a long way. For others, that Ned Flanders optimism was noxious and two-faced.
Failure and despair are the open secret of Christians. Every
(honest) person experiences it. Few talk about it. Because Christians are
taught that Christianity is the hopeful up-and-up religion. So we bury our
despair and come to church looking for a touch from God, an injection of hope.
And when it feels elusive, we add shame and disillusionment to our laundry
list.
But I think a biblical expression of Christianity is
comfortable with the language of despair. It does offer hope, but only when
we’ve absolutely come to the end of ourselves. As one Facebook commenter
recently told me, “Christianity is the last choice for most of us. By the time
we show up at church, God is doing something major.”
I don’t want Christians to lose the language of hope; to
always just shrug their shoulders at pain and say, “well… life sucks.” But I’d
love for us to cultivate a more honest vocabulary for suffering which gives
people permission to spend time in the pit, which accepts sorrow, that isn’t
threatened by despair. Because I think that’s the place where God really
surprises us with hope.
