Hope When the End Comes

“Midnight is when the day begins.”

— U2, Lemon (1993)

When the end comes and all hope seems lost,

When the journey draws finally to a close,

When anticipation or shock bear their annihilating cost,

There we have it—a sense for reality beyond denial’s repose.

When the end comes and God is our only hope,

When the journey shows us from whence we’ve come,

When there’s no sense holding on, for there’s no more rope,

There we have it—a reality leaving us not doubting where life’s from.

When the end finally comes and despair’s entered the room,

When the journey stops in its tracks and all comes to a grinding halt,

When we must face and accept—a new reality to groom,

There we have it—the opportunity to trudge beyond the new day’s jolt.

***

How are we to endure the ending of something we cannot ignore?

How are we to get through when the only option is to change?

Change, in these parts, is the only grace afforded, but there is the blessing... no other options mean there is no choice but to break out of the midnight fight and enter the new day’s light. The midnight fight is synonymous with a life that just led us to death, over and over and over again.

If we’re wise, we’ll endure only so much death!

But the ending of things that have led us to death after death seems like a death all itself. Such change tears at the fibres of our familiarity. We feel never lonelier as we venture into the unrecognisable blinding daylight and everywhere are the reminders, not of hope but of what we’ve lost—everywhere, it seems.

Believing Beyond the Scariness

Change is scary. We could neither stay the way we were nor enjoy this new journey.

The very cool thing about such scariness, though, is the innate melancholy we are invited to engage, with God, in. God comes close in our fear and sadness; where there is no place to run or hide.

But we must believe that God is there, with us, for he is.

And because there’s no choice, God’s Presence is all the more apparent, if we trust.

Truth be known, God’s bringing us to our logical end points to things all the time. We grieve; that’s natural. But with God, a day at a time, we get through. We endure the pain, we learn, and we get through.

When we don’t give up, not turning back to a no man’s land of a time now gone, a place that no longer exists, we gain a gift of immeasurable worth. This gift is a new life in God.

Midnight is when the day begins. It’s the rock bottom scariness we sometimes need.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.