Here’s a hard truth- There are long-reaching consequences when we have gone through too much hard stuff at one time. Too much loss. Too much grief. I’m not talking about the normal, daily struggle of living. I am talking about seasons that sweep you away, leaving you disoriented and gasping for breath in their wake.
As I approach the two-year anniversary of divorce and cancer, I have found, to my dismay, that one of the long-term consequences of my season of loss is that a worldview previously unfamiliar to me has stubbornly taken up root in my heart.
Cynicism.
Cynicism is, simply, a profound feeling of distrust. While this makes sense for someone who went endured all I went through at once, I don’t like the fact that cynicism moved in and set up housekeeping in my wounded heart.
“I don’t want to be like this,” I tell God through my tears. “Please heal my cynical heart.”
Lately, I have begun to wonder if cynicism is taking up space in my heart because I have been forced to redefine “hope.” Let me explain.
Once, I had a therapist tell me, “You are addicted to hope. And that is not a good thing.” What she was trying to say was that I had latched onto a warped version of hope, one that was stubbornly removed from reality, clinging to a false belief about my current situation despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. I wanted things to be different than they were, so I chose to believe that it was so.
That is not hope. That is denial. True hope, my friends, must exist in harmony with truth. So, since I didn’t have much experience with true hope, once my denial was uprooted I was left with cynicism.
What a bummer.
Lately, I have begun to tentatively reach out to touch the fringes of hope. I want it so much, but I also fear it because it feels like hope has the power to destroy me. What if I hope, and tragedy strikes again? What if hope breaks my barely-pieced-together-heart?
Kate Bowler says we turn up the dial on hope by making room for what only God can do.
So maybe that is what hope is - holding space for God. Perhaps hope is an intentional awareness of the places God is showing up, even when there are so many other places we wish he would. Maybe hope is gratitude for all the ways God showed up in the past, even as we grieved other prayers which remained unanswered.
This, according to the Psalms, is what Israel did in the moments when all was dark. She remembered.
The Red Sea parting …
Pharaoh’s armies swept away …
God’s sustenance in the wilderness …
Israel remembered. She praised him. She gave thanks. In doing so, she found the strength to hope that he was still the same God.
So, today, I will crack open the door to my heart where, in despair, I locked hope away. I will reach tenderly into the recesses of my soul, long-cloaked in grief, and bring hope back out into the light. The same God who mended my broken heart, who healed my cancer, who against all odds provided for my needs these two long years is still here.
His love endures forever.
His mercy is everlasting.
He was, and is, and is to come.
This is my God, and so, I dare to hope.