I listened to the podcast “Everything Happens” with Kate Bowler. Her guest was a former professor of mine, Dr. Richard Hayes. I can still picture him carrying a Bible in one hand and a guitar in the other. He was the cool professor everyone wanted to hang out with. Richard and Kate talked a lot about hope because they both were diagnosed with cancer around the same time. She was 35 and he was the Dean and they were both walking the halls of the medical center near Duke where they sought healing and hope. Though both faced terrible odds, both survived.
Kate says that though she lived, she cannot unlearn what she experienced during her early onset of cancer. Toward the end of the podcast, they talk about hope. Would she live to be able to raise her kids? Would he live to take another trip with his wife? But even if they didn’t, what kind of hope do we place in God when this life ends. Does God ultimately have us? It is not the shallow kind of hope that says “I hope that” but the hope born out of the trenches of life. Since last week, I wrote about the dangers of cynicism, I thought this week, I might share with you this idea about hope.
Richard said that while working on a book with his son, his son sent him this quote from a singer-songwriter, Nick Cave.
“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position, either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act as small as you like, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time we come to find that it is so.”
Richard goes on to say that for him, the world is worth believing in because it is God’s creation. What about you? What gives you hope? How does that hope rise up as a warrior emotion in you?
Grace and Peace,
Carla
