Desperate Hope

So I have been thinking about hope lately. Well, hope has been weaseling its way into my existence over the last few weeks. It's a strange thing to me. I haven't ever needed it. (yeah right)

I mean, I have hoped for this-es and that-s, but not ever had really real hope. You know like the kind of hope that the slaves had. Someday we will be free kind of hope. I haven't ever needed to.

So this last year has been a bit of a roller-coaster. If you are near my circle, you know that my world has been changed, life-altered, this last year. I took over a company, got new business partners, my friends have changed, I got a dog. You know, my life is different. Its exciting and challenging and all together really stressful.

So in the midst of this chaos, I have started to change. I wasn't intending to, but i have changed. (on a side note, change must happen, it just has to or else you deteriorate. I truly believe this. We must embrace change and integrate it, not fret about it or try to ignore it. All the people I know that are truly mediocre or just downright unsuccessful are afraid of change)

This change I have been going through has got to be some sort of maturation or whatever. (i seriously have just about every person I know call me immature, hence the "whatever") AND in this transformation have become a borderline cynical realist. I have been down this year, I mean really down. I have had maybe the highest highs also. And in the process I have started to think that this is just life. Sometimes you are down, sometimes you are up. That's it. Its reality. Hence the realist in me coming out. "That's how it is, deal." But, is that the world-view a Christian should have, I mean what about joy and all that peace and stuff?

In my world, there's this camp of people that talk about Christianity like it is a self-convinced (some call this the Spirit, but I am afraid to use the Spirit as an justification) look at life through rose colored lenses. Like once you meet Jesus, all your problems go away. Like you don't have relational baggage to attend to, and like you can't be pissed or depressed or needy along the way. This is just garbage. We don't stop being us. God doesn't want us to. Or else, we wouldn't have problems anymore. If there is anything that has been illustrated by history, its that problems keep coming, if not get worse with the church. Again realist, cynical, jerk. Shut up Matt and get on with it.

So there's hope...

Hope intersects the world. Realism sucks, hope is the great equilizer.

I just watched "The Shawshank Redeption" the other day. There is this scene in the prison where the two main characters are talking in "the yard" outside. The main character, Andy, has seemingly gone crazy and everyone thinks he is going to commit suicide. The reality of the prison has set in. Or at least that is what everyone thinks. So he starts this conversation about the ocean and Mexico and how Andy really wants to see it. His friend, Red, tells him to stop because he will never see it and he will just drive himself crazy. Andy responds with something to the effect of, "They can take everything away from you, everything. But they can't take away hope." You see Hope had intersected Andy at a dark time in a dark place. It started changing him.

Hope can just sit there and infect. Hallelujah.

I am learning that hope is what needs to be the thing that drives us in the dark places when its hard to have faith and hard to love people. My generation needs this. We need to realize what our darknesses are. In my opinion, comfort is the great slavery that binds the people in affluent America. We need to realize how subtly dangerous this slavery is and that it exists and has a whole lot of control.

And then we need to let hope set in in the dark places. Let it grow, let it build. It needs to force action and force a desperate desire to have hope come to fruition in love and peace.

I have started to feel hopeful in my dark places just recently. Only because it found me. Like it found Andy. It showed up in a casual conversation, a song, a whatever, and it stuck. It sat there for me. Now I need to understand its desperation to grow and build in my life and consequently in the lives around me. I think that hope is a love language of the Spirit of God. It moves on a whim, it changes generations and causes massive upheavals. But this sort of hope is desperate. It comes from desperation and in desperation takes seed and causes passionate, courageous, life-shift kind of action.

I think for me, its a process. We are all desperate for something at any given point. However we are not always aware that we are. I have come to begin to understand that hope is powerful for me when I get slammed by my desperation, when I get sick off it. That's when the petri dish starts to cultivate and create a cure for heart ailment.

I hope.