“Promise me if you go on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, you’ll take me so I can sit in the audience.”
This is my father’s only request when it comes to the book release of Stuff Christians Like. I’ve never been on television. Two people attended the only meet and greet I’ve held. I’ve been assured by one of the biggest publishers in the world that Christian humor books simply do not sell. But I think that parents are required by DNA to hope. To believe that anything is possible if not down right probable.
I am encouraged by his hope, but to be honest with you, I’ve had a few puzzling years with that word “hope.” I’ve had a bit of a struggle. And it’s not what I expected of Christ and faith.
Life fell apart in the summer of 2005. I’ve shared that sentence so many times you have to be getting tired of it, but that’s what happened. And I guess I thought after that experience, when I had come clean and had full disclosure with people and laid it all down, that things would feel a certain way. I thought forgiveness and grace would feel round and full and complete and that freedom would feel incredible. But it didn’t.
Hope was not as instantaneous and complete as I would have preferred. Sanctification was not accomplished in the span of a long weekend. And that’s when I started to learn about the three stages of hope.
Hope is one of the first things that disappears when you get lost. Your ability to see beyond your current circumstances is chased south by the shadows. Your ability to dream and plan and hold visions close to your chest fades until hope feels foreign and far away.
And when you become a Christian, there’s the temptation to think you’re doing something wrong if you don’t feel hopeful 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But here’s the thing about hope, it takes time. And sometimes, I think our greatest frustrations are when we try to force hope into a stage it’s just not ready for. I don’t hear people talk about the stages that often, but I think hope is divided into three:
1. Learning to live with the past.
2. Learning to live in the present.
3. Learning to dream about the future.
I don’t have scientific proof of these, good luck Bunsen burnering hope, but those are the three stages I’ve experienced in my own life and here’s what they look like:
1. Learning to live with the past.
When my wife and I started to work on our marriage, this was what we did first. Walk through and talk through hurt from the before. We didn’t dwell in it. We didn’t let it define our future, but we had to be honest about it. We had to admit scars and fears and doubts that had taken root in the first few years of our marriage. We had to learn to live with a past that refused to stay quiet. As I’ve often said before, unless you deal with it, the past turns into a collection of knives hidden around your house. If you haven’t forgiven each other, then all the sudden you’ll see a character on a television show do what you did and you’ll get stabbed. Someone will make an offhand joke at a dinner party and you’ll get stabbed by that memory. So for us, learning to live with the past was about removing knives.
2. Learning to live in the present.
I think satan is desperate to keep you out of the now, because it’s where Christ lives. I’m convinced that in the moment, in the hours we’re given, Christ is waiting. And satan loves to keep us focused on a past we can’t change or a future we can’t control instead of in a present we can participate in. But after a life of running, being in your own skin and letting go of the masks is going to feel a little weird. And you’re going to need to learn how to live in the present. For my wife and I, that meant finally having honest conversations. We were one of those Christian couples that says, “Things are great, we never fight.” We weren’t fighting or disagreeing in large part because we were not being honest with each other about our feelings. And once we spent time learning to live with the past, we had to find our way in the present.
3. Learning to dream about the future.
It’s weird, but I never noticed that I didn’t actively dream about the future until I tried to. After coming through the first two stages of hope, I looked at the future and I just couldn’t do it. My wife and I would sit down in chairs in our yard and stare at each other, “So what do you want to do this year? What about the next five? What do those look like to you?” We’d ask ourselves questions over and over and we never really had an answer. We were so out of practice, we had been on two different teams previously and that’s pretty common. Even if you’re not married, it’s pretty easy to get so splintered up inside with your desires and who you’re pretending to be that it’s difficult to dream about the future. But I’m convinced this is a critical part of hope.
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced one of those stages of hope. Maybe I’m way off base here. Maybe my individual experience is nothing like the collective experience. But if you have, if you’ve ever had anything like this in your life, I hope you’ll give yourself the gift of time. One of my greatest frustrations is trying to force my way out of one of those seasons. To yell at God essentially and say, “I got it, we’re good living in the present. Let’s focus on the future now!” But it doesn’t work that way.
Hope is sometimes slow. It’s sometimes instant. Sometimes God grabs you and you skip all those seasons. Sometimes you spend years in one. It’s never the same. But what is, what I do know about you, is that regardless of who you are or where you are or how long you’ve been divorced or unemployed or living a double life, you need hope.
Like I need hope.
Like we all need hope.
And that’s what God wants to give you.
