July-August 1997
From Hopelessness to Hope
by R. Ruth Barton
It was a hopeless situation as far as the life of the baby was concerned. My friend was only five months pregnant but, due to an incompetent cervix, labor had begun and no amount of medication or bed rest would stop it.
The doctor solemnly declared that if the birth process continued, the baby would die because the lungs were not fully developed. We hoped against hope that by some miracle my friend's contractions would cease, but they did not. The nurses prepped her for delivery, but there was no excitement. Only dread.
My friend invited me to accompany her into the delivery room to share this human drama: The baby girl, who had been kicking contentedly in the womb only a few minutes earlier, died as she passed through the birth canal. The fact that she was perfectly formed with blond hair and 10 little toes only made the loss seem greater. What was usually a life-giving process produced death.
For a few suspended moments we gazed unabashedly into each other's souls, bound together by humanity, vulnerability and shared pain.
Life and death were there, so closely intertwined. Together we grieved the loss of this child who was already so greatly loved.
Where Is Hope?
To think that we, mere mortals, can give each other compassion and strength -- even in our most troubling times -- is a great source of hope to me.
But in light of the hopelessness that flows through a society in which marriages routinely fail and families fall apart, 50-year-old men get laid off by the companies to whom they have given their best years, violence strikes closer and closer to home, AIDS continues to spread with no cure in sight, and the news is filled with images of starving African children keeping vigil for their mothers who lay dyingI have had to ask: Is it enough? Is it enough to know that we share the human plight with millions of others on the planet, or is there something more?
Many of us have learned to turn away when such images intrude on our fragile peace. There is little energy for coping with what is going on in the world "out there" when the despair we feel in other people's lives leaves us so drained.
When love (or the lack of it) hurts more than we ever thought it could. When the child whom we have loved so deeply levels harsh criticism and turns away. When the onset of a spouse's Alzheimer's disease robs us of the leisure and warm companionship we expected in our golden years.
When a father dies without uttering the words we have longed to hear. When we fail one more time to lose weight, stop drinking or choose the loving responseit's hard enough to have hope for ourselves, let alone for the problems that are as big as the world.
Without Religion
Perhaps the most compelling reason why feelings of despair resonate in the souls of so many today has less to do with what is going on "out there" than with what is lacking inside. As Douglas Coupland writes in his honest little book Life After God, many of us are among "the first generation raised without religion."
Speaking as a member of the so-called Generation X, Coupland describes his life as one that was full of material trappings but empty of love and meaning. The result? A profound sense of hopelessness.
He says: "I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road my life has taken and I endlessly rehash the compromises I have made in my life. I have an insecure and vaguely crappy job with an amoral corporation so I don't have to worry about money. I put up with halfway relationships so as not to have to worry about loneliness. I have lost the ability to recapture the purer feelings of my younger years in exchange for a streamlined narrow-mindedness that I assumed would propel me to 'the top.' What a joke."
Discovering We're Not Alone
Ironically enough, it is this very hopelessness that for Coupland becomes the road to God. For 360 pages he follows the questions that his feelings of hopelessness and isolation raise until finally he comes to this awareness: "My secret is that I need God -- I am sick and I can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."
Even those of us who think we have God in our hip pockets are surprised by the darkness that can take up residence in our souls in response to a world that is so flawed. We are even more surprised to find God in the midst of it as did Eileen Silva Kindig after the embezzlement of her husband's business. She had repeatedly warned her husband about a person who abused time, money and benefits. Her husband's toleration of this abuse finally resulted in embezzlement that cost them nearly everything they had built over 15 years.
After it was over, she says: "I no longer saw Prince Charming as I looked at my husband. What I saw was a man who'd lacked the stamina to take a stand and put some muscle behind it -- a man who hadn't protected his family. I was deeply disillusioned" (Eileen Silva Kindig, Goodbye Prince Charming).
Eileen's disillusionment was much more than a passing discouragement. It went bone deep, churning up questions about the meaning of marriage, intimacy, trust and real life vs. fairy-tale dreams. But as she faced her disenchantment with eyes and heart wide open, she found that it became an entry point into another leg of the spiritual journey.
"Until the embezzlement, I didn't know how strong I could be or that a hero is not always perfect. I didn't know I could survive life outside the fairy tale. But in making these discoveries I learned I could trust myself to recover from pain as well as to trust that even the most difficult legs of my journey would lead me exactly where I needed to go. I began to trust that I was being guided by Someone outside myself and all was well."
These deeply hopeful beliefs were far more than platitudes for Eileen. They were hard-won truths learned in the process of facing realities that left her questioning the very existence of hope.
Paradoxically, true hope is often found in this way. As we follow the path that our feelings of hopelessness carve out for us, we discover that God is there. We are surprised at finding God in such an unlikely place, but finding him makes the entire journey worthwhile. We learn, more surely than we have ever known, that we are not alone, and that is the biggest step we will ever take toward hope.
But as we walk the path from hopelessness to hope with God, he shows us more.
The Gift of Meaning
A 16-year-old girl is killed in an accident involving a drunk driver. Her mother joins other mothers in the fight against drunk driving saying, "Knowing that something good might come of this is the only thing that gives me hope."
A young man living in a conservative Midwestern town tests HIV positive as a result of a brief period of promiscuity during his college years. In coming to grips with his situation, he decides to "go public" by granting interviews to local newspapers and speaking to young people in churches and schools. He figures that if kids can put a face -- his face -- on this dreaded disease, he might be able to encourage them to make better choices than he did.
His face glows with the knowledge that he is making a difference in this world and that God has taken this seemingly hopeless situation and invested it with purpose.
A 9th-grade boy unexpectedly contracts leu-kemia and dies within the year. At his funeral, high school student after high school student stands to give testimony to the impact this boy's life and death has had.
One girl speaks for many when she says, "Because of knowing him, I want to get my act together and make my life count for God." His family members experience heartbreaking grief but at the same time inexplicable hope that this was not just one more meaningless death in a cold cosmos. It was a life and death that had an impact that will reverberate into eternity.
Those of us who travel the path from hopelessness to hope with God will find him doing the most amazing thing. We will find him crafting a gift -- the gift of meaning in life -- out of that thing that hurts so terribly. When he hands the gift back to us, we are astonished to find that, even in the midst of grief, we are more full in deeper places than we ever thought possible. For wrapped up with the gift of meaning and purpose is hope. Where we least expected it.
The pain points of our lives bring us to a fork in the road where we must make a choice. To allow ourselves to become hard, bitter, cynical or stagnant is a choice. To keep living for some future escape is to refuse the present. But to allow God, through the difficulties of our lives, to chisel away at our character and transform us into strong and noble people well, that's the road less traveled. It is the road toward hope, and choosing that road will make all the difference.
So, where in the world is hope? Hope is within individuals who enter the journey that grief initiates and find God there. It is these individuals who bring hope to their corner of the world.
Does that mean that grief is gone? Of course not! We still grieve for marriages that are not all we had hoped they would be. We grieve for 16-year-olds who are killed by drunk drivers. We grieve for children who must watch their parents die.
But once we have found God, we do not grieve without hope. We are accompanied in our grief by God's Spirit, who "is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselvesand keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good" (Romans 8:26-28, The Message).
Therein lies hope.
R. Ruth Barton is an author and speaker from Wheaton, Illinois. She is currently working on her Master of Divinity at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.