There are seasons in life where there is much prosperity, just as there are seasons where we are being refined. Being refined doesn’t happen when life is spared of challenges. The saving grace of hardship and grief and difficulty and trials and every other kind of setback is the hope we have for recovery.
Within a single day we may face the changing of seasons, for example, happiness morphed into sadness morphed into anxiety morphed into relief. All in the one day or week—a mishmash of emotions of reality.
Within a single day we can also find ourselves cast into a season of refining.
These are seasons where we’re backwashed in a torrent of pain we cannot reconcile, where we find ourselves just battling to survive emotionally and spiritually.
And that season can last months. If not years. Hard to reconcile the length of those terms.
And what is it that characterises the particular season where life has plunged into death?
I don’t mean death from a literal viewpoint, of course, or death from an eternal life perspective, either, but I mean death to the old life. That old life is gone.
Indeed, it could very well be argued by many of us that with the old life gone, a new life becoming, we have not plunged into death, on the contrary, we have been inserted into life; the only true life we were ever destined to experience.
Yet it’s hard, even impossible to the many who have been there and walked the other way.
Many found it all too hard, because the reality is, it’s a living hell. Those who haven’t been there don’t truly know what such grief is like. Pardon the language, it is shit. (My word processor just suggested I don’t use that word because it may offend, and I apologise if it does. Nonetheless, I want to convey that it’s that hard.)
And yet, what becomes most apparent, especially as we journey together with hope-filled others who are on that same distressing journey, we are living our faith better than we ever have done before.
Nothing says “faith” better than living bravely amid loss. And nothing compels faith more than a hope in a realistic expectation for recovery.
There are many hopes we can pin our faith to, but not all of these are true and wise and realistic. If our hope sails on the wind of convenience, of dreams that won’t come true, of expectations that are overblown, such a false hope will end our faith journey at some point.
But recovery is inevitably a good hope, because our expectations are based solely in what we will do as individuals. See how this is a good hope? Where we have agency, we have power, and that power is for change—the change we’ve always wanted to live into.
See how the hope of recovery is not contingent on other people or in situations that may not come true? The hope of recovery is simply a hope that in recovery, by faith, we will survive, we will adapt, and inevitably we will overcome. Recovery is a simple, achievable hope. So long as we keep doing the basic things, we advance upon the path toward the objective.
A little faith in a good hope is all you need when you have nothing else, provided that good hope is based in the premise of reality. Indeed, that’s the definition of “good hope.” Good hope, as opposed to false hope, will see a person succeed on their journey of recovery.
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The astounding thing about these conjoined concepts, faith and hope, is that hope will lead us by faith to the goal, even if that is years away. Indeed, it is compelling, from a spiritual viewpoint, that the only way to genuinely live—the abundant life, I mean—is by such faith.
Isn’t it both interesting and paradoxical that we only start living by faith when we enter struggle street? We don’t need faith beforehand. Why is it that many are disinterested in God? They either don’t need the divine presence, or they had a negative experience of “God” through a negative example of church or spirituality. God is completely reframed to the positive through loss and grief when we recognise we need something completely external to ourselves.
Faith comes to the fore at the time of trial. Until our lives have been turned upside down, we have a little reason to rely on God.
Yet the truth is God will be found when we need him most. “Ask..., seek..., knock” and the knowledge of God is granted, but we are disinterested until we’re interested.
It is faith that will get us to where we need to go, yet it is a true hope that we need to have faith in. If our goal is simply a content life, where we can be a blessing to others, that hope is a real hope that anyone can attain.
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