“The best we can hope for in this life is a knothole peek at the shining realities ahead. Yet a glimpse is enough. It’s enough to convince our hearts that whatever sufferings and sorrows currently assail us aren’t worthy of comparison to that which waits over the horizon.” -Joni Eareckson Tada
It’s a sad, and tragic reality of life that one can have it all, wealth, fame, accomplishment, even love…yet without hope, life can be a dark and foreboding place.
One of the individual misfortunes that causes me to reflect upon this reality is that of Comedian and Actor, Robin Williams. Having rocketed to stardom portraying the crazy but loveable character of Mork from Ork, Robin Williams has since demonstrated a broad range of talent and ability with lists upon lists of awards honoring his stellar performances that have made us laugh, cry and think. He was a man who seemingly had it all; who had arrived at the very pinnacle of his craft; a craft which brought him great wealth and popularity.
Williams achieved what most could have only dreamed, and yet none of what he possessed influenced nor even mitigated the despair that was hidden so adeptly in the deep parts of his soul; he, finally succumbing to his own personal despair by ending his life on August 11, 2014. His tragic end reveals the truth that a man can have everything that the world deems necessary to a happy life, but none of those things, nor all of them combined have the capacity to produce hope in the human heart. And a man can live without a lot of things, but he ultimately cannot live without hope.
Have you ever seen hopelessness with your very eyes? Perhaps it’s a silly question given that hopelessness is an abstract reality that lives silently in the metaphysical world of the human heart. But it is possible to see it if you look with different eyes.
Missionaries have regularly witnessed it on the fields to which they’ve been called. Take Robert Moffat for instance. Moffat was a Scottish pioneer missionary to South Africa for over 50 years and was greatly used by God. He opened mission stations within the interior; translated the Bible into the language of the Bechuana tribe; was instrumental in bringing tribal chiefs to Christ, as well as being the persuading influence that sent David Livingstone to Africa instead of China.
In 1817, Moffat set out for the village of the Namaquas where he saw for the first time the Kuruman River and the Bechuanas. As he viewed the smoke from the villages of the Bechuanas, Robert Moffat saw what no one else did.
“I have seen, at different times the smoke of a thousand villages. Villages whose people are without Christ, without God, and without hope in the world.”
It was their hopelessness that moved him to spend his entire life on the mission field, facing down all kinds of unforeseen hazards. The vision of their hopelessness enabled Robert Moffat to see his world with missionary eyes.
I can relate to Moffat’s vision. Last February, I chanced upon hopelessness as I returned to Nepal on a mission trip. As prosperous as our evangelistic efforts were during the week, a truly remarkable and unforgettable experience happened the day we left that small Asian country, to return home.
Hours before our flight left, our team visited the Pashupatinath Hindu Temple in Kathmandu. This temple is famous for the thousands of open-air cremations performed every year, cremations which seemingly every faithful Hindu in Nepal hopes to be a part of since to have one’s ashes dumped into the sacred river after death supposedly ensures a pleasant afterlife.
As we walked into the temple complex, the place gave off an air of an Asian Disneyland marketplace. The walkways were lined with shops and curios; of people dressed in bizarre costumes decked in orange holy paint from head to toe. Some, wearing masks of Hindu gods posed with frolicsome tourists taking selfies of the experience, perhaps forgetting that this was not just a cultural place of interest, but a place where funerals were being held; where human pain and sorrow had come to live.
Vendors hawking their wares, selling everything from jewelry to snacks, bartered, cajoled and followed us from one end of the complex to the other trying to get us to take advantage of the opportunity to buy a grisly keepsake. All the while, the dead, both rich and poor, were burned upon funeral pyres from cement outcroppings up and down the river with the cries of loved ones going unheeded by those watching with zoo-like fascination and detachment from just across the river.
It was our unfortunate experience to watch a Hindu funeral in progress just before they lit the pyre. Relatives and attendants brought a grieving woman, who I spied as being the widow of the deceased, down to the orange-decked out platform. She wept and howled in distress as she said her last good-byes to the man I was told was someone of great influence and wealth in his community.
From across the river, I purposely sought to snap a picture of this grieving woman’s face. No one, not the crowd of people assembled around the pyre, nor those who came to show their respect seemed to be moved by this widow’s distress. Her cries seemed to go unheeded; unnoticed midst the din of the crowd.
And when you add to that the whole macabre touristy display of the entire environment, I realized that what I was witnessing was hopelessness. Utter hopelessness. I found it in the surroundings of that ancient pagan temple; in the faces of those dressed in dedication to their gods; in the attendants dressed in white each tending to the dozens of fires still burning who with long wooden poles unceremoniously flipped the charred remains of human appendages back into the fire as they burned away from the torso. But mostly, I saw hopelessness in the agonized face of a woman who would never again see the man she had loved in this life.
Looking back, I wish I could have done something; said something…screamed something hopeful to those assembled across the river; to the widow in her obvious, and unrelenting grief, the hope that is found only in Jesus. But I knew, nothing of what I could say would have been received nor even understood by the assembled group of pagan Nepali worshippers.
This story reminds me that the great and almost tangible dividing line between those who have a relationship with Jesus and those who don’t; it is the reality of a living hope.
For the believer in Jesus, life is lived from a vastly different perspective than that of the hopeless world surrounding us. According to the Apostle Peter, God is to be praised and worshipped intelligently and wholeheartedly, for he writes:
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you.” — 1 Peter 1:3
A living hope! Or, ἐλπίδα ζῶσαν, in the Greek. How strange it might seem to refer to something as intangible as hope, as something that is “living”. The noun from which this participle comes is the Greek word, Zoe. And it’s an amazing word. As someone once said, “it’s a small Greek word with a big meaning.” And apparently, it was one of Peter’s favorite words to describe the Christian faith.
Unlike in English, there are several words in Greek that are translated “life” in English; one is bios, from which we get the word “biology”, the study of life. It’s a word that speaks to the biological or physical life we find in creation. From flora to fauna; from insects to animals; from the heavenly bodies we see in the sky to our own existence as human beings. This is bios-life. Life, through the process of natural decay and renewal; and the laws of entropy continually find themselves subject to the prospect and reality of death.
But “Zoe” is an altogether different kind of life; it’s life that cannot be influenced or affected by the decay of time or death. All that is biological will one day die. It will cease to exist. But Zoe-life is different. Zoe-life is eternal. It’s life that is spiritual in nature which finds its source in the divine, uncreated, incorruptible, indestructible, eternal life that is found God himself.
It is to this spiritual reality that Peter is referring when he describes the hope that the child of God has been given. The divine hope we have been given in Christ is like a natural bubbling spring, the source of which runs deeply in the caverns of an unknown source but that bubbles to the surface in ever-flowing torrents of naturally filtered water, cold and clean. A refreshing source of sustenance that revitalizes the hot, weary and disheveled soul who happens upon it; and taps into it. This is living hope. And it is ever-living because it never dies.
It reminds me of the uniquely beautiful story by Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption. In the story, we are invited into the world of Andy Dufrene who in the Maine prison world of Shawshank where evil and corruption abound, struggles to find hope in the grey world of his prison surroundings. After having made his escape to freedom for a crime he didn’t commit, Andy writes to his friend Louis Boyd Redding these remarkable words, “Remember Red, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
The hope we have been given by God in Christ is just that kind of a thing; it’s a good thing…and it cannot die. So when we find ourselves in our own grey and foreboding circumstance and surroundings; when in life you hit an immovable wall impossible to traverse; when “confusion’s your companion and despair holds you for ransom”, it’s not that hope has died. Eternal hope cannot die, you just need to tap into the hope that flows from God.
For according to Peter this hope is based in the tangible reality of the Resurrection of Jesus (I Peter 1:3), and further, the writer of Hebrews tells us that this living hope can be an anchor of the soul in turbulent and uncertain times. For when we trust in the reality of the hope we find in Jesus, we discover that all that has been promised rests upon the unchangeable nature of a God who cannot lie.
“God did this so that, by two unchangeable things which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” — Hebrews 6:18-19
Lately, God has been teaching me just how solid, firm and secure living by faith in God really is. For I am simply not living in hope of something good that’s coming, it’s more than that: I am living on hope itself.
Recently, my life has hit a wall of uncertainty. My pastoral ministry in my current church has come to an end and although I did not seek it, our family was thrust into a financial hardship that has caused in us justifiable concern and worries about the future. “Where are we going to live? How are we going to be able to make enough money to survive? Where will God send us next?” Everywhere we turn there are unanswered questions as to our future as a family.
And yet, in the midst of such uncertainty; with threats to our security challenging us at every turn, I’ve found that one of the most secure places to live your life from is to live it by complete dependence upon God’s goodness. It’s as though I’ve pitched my tent upon hope itself; as though it were a tangible stone foundation.
Everything, everything I need just to survive; from the food I eat; to the gas I put in my car; from the days of substitute teaching I need to fill up my calendar so that I can help provide for my family; to the promise of God that he will send me to a new ministry, all of it…all of it depends upon God’s power and providence to provide. And every time, every time, we have a need God moves to meet it, in response to my heart cry.
I have prayed this prayer over and over again to God, “Lord, you are my only hope! Without your kindness and grace, I’ll not survive.” And each time God moves to meet my need or desire…in hundreds of small and imperceptible ways God shows me his love and that he can be trusted to fulfill his promises.
So secure; so quiet my life has become that my “if’s” and “hope so’s” have become “when’s…” and “I know’s…”. Before I always hedged my bet; sought to think ahead and spread underneath my life, a safety net of contingency. But now, I hear myself saying to my wife, when she asks me which days I am slated to work at the high school, “Not every day is filled yet…but God will fill them.” And inevitably, he does.
What hope and joy and adventure there is to this kind of life!
I am living on hope! And God himself, my daddy who hears me, sees me, knows and loves me, kindly reminds me over and over again, “You’re still my boy. Just let daddy worry about it; you just wait and trust me.”
And so…I will. What else can I do…I have no other hope?