Learning to Hope

I am cautious with my heart, not by nature but through experience. Yet Trust has been a recurring call in my journey with Christ – trust, and pain, and hope.

The first call I heard from the Lord was: Trust Me to make you whole. I had accepted Christ as my Savior, but I was anything but whole. I didn’t know how healing could happen; I could not imagine any world in which I did not carry this pain with me. Persistently and gently, though, the Lord called to me: Trust Me to heal you. Like the woman who reached out to touch merely the hem of Jesus’ robe, I hardly dared ask for His attention – and He turned and gave me the fullness of His healing grace. Even now, I am staggered by the power and grace with which Christ worked in the dark places of my heart.

The second time I heard that call was in the context of writing my book and – even more so – doing publicity interviews this past summer. I was forced to confront the agony of my own vulnerability. Would I be respected? Would I be liked? Or would I be a failure? And here, sharp and clear, came the Lord’s call: Trust me to lead you.

Moving forward in the dark, trusting that the Lord knows where all this leads, has become easier with practice – honestly, in large part because the Lord has had mercy on me, weak as I am, and has graciously showed me some of the ways that my work has borne fruit.

As I have trusted the Lord with my pain and my fears, I have discovered peace: no longer fearing the loss of the good things in my life, no longer to try to hedge against a dark and unknown future, but rather giving thanks from a grateful heart to the Lord who has so abundantly blessed my life.

I thought I had learned all I needed to learn about trust. But I hadn’t.

I had still not trusted Him with my hopes.

In this new season of my life, this springtime after a long dry spell, I have begun to hope and long for more – and the awakening of hope bites deeply, with its own peculiar agony.

To reach out means the possibility of rejection. To love means the possibility of being hurt. To speak means the possibility of getting tangled up in words and saying the wrong thing.

And so the pain of hope can mute the heart that wants so badly to sing out.

In my old life, I had learned to hope for nothing. Having been hurt, my hopes not just shattered but trampled on, I had learned to settle for as little as possible; after all, one cannot be disappointed if one expects nothing. But now, in this new life (and what a gift, what an unmerited and gracious gift is this life!) all that was changed: I was being called to not just life, but life in abundance.

Here was the third and most difficult call: Trust me with your deepest hopes.

I realized that I had only been willing to trust the Lord with those hopes for which I had a backup plan to address by my own efforts. For the things I hoped for that are out of my control – my desire for deep and meaningful connections, for love – I was afraid to even pray.

Part of me thought I was a fool: how was it possible that I should deserve such hopes? And deep down I feared that if I admitted to the Father that I longed for more, He would certainly deny me the very thing I hoped for.

I had it all wrong, so completely wrong. It is not a question of my own merit, for I have none. “I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table.” It is not a question of negotiating with the Lord over how many good things I am allowed to have – as if I were allowed to be blessed to a certain extent, and no more. No.

It is a question of who I am.

By the grace of God, I know who I am. I am the daughter of the Father, the adopted sister of the Son, the temple of the Holy Spirit. Unchangeably so. Not through anything I did or could ever do, but because of what Christ did for me.

I had been reflecting and praying about this for months, all through the fall and winter. It all came into focus at the beginning of this year, late one afternoon when I knelt at evening prayer.

I realized – fully and deeply – that God’s love for me is not an abstract idea, but a living and present reality. In holding back my hopes, I was failing to trust the One who loves me more deeply and fully than I can comprehend.

I wept. I repented of my own failure to trust. Turning to Christ, I asked my Savior to bring me, prodigal that I am, into the Father’s presence; to cover me with his righteousness, to set my hopes and dreams – all of them – before the Father on my behalf.

It was as though something shattered, something transparent that had yet stood between me and my Father’s love. For the first time, I was able to say Mary’s words with joy rather than resignation: “Let it be to me according to your word.”

And I find, to my surprise, that knowing who I am – knowing my identity in Christ – has set me free in a way I never expected. Given me not just freedom from fear – but also freedom to hope. Freedom to love.

Hope is hard, I have found; I suspect love is, also. But as I pray each day in this new season, I discover that it is hard in a good way, the same way that disciplining oneself as an athlete is hard: it takes practice, and it doesn’t happen all at once. Everything I have discovered about trust is just the beginning: an invitation to take a chance, to be vulnerable, to step out into that future of God’s plans as yet unknown to me. No longer in fear, because I know who I am and I know that I am secure in Christ’s love. So here and now, in my own halting, awkward way, I lift my hopes – all of them – to the Lord who loves me.

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Related posts:

1. Why Is Hope a Virtue?
2. Hope and Love on the Way of the Cross: The Transfiguration of Jesus