(Today's Music: Falling Further by Spoken)
So, while I was sitting in another of my company-sponsored voyeur sessions (in Cincinnati this time), I got the news: my job and all the jobs in my current building in northern Indiana are being relocated to New York effective sometime 3rd quarter 2006.
Great. Well, that sure inspired me to work harder, didn't it?
So, while I worked long hours in Cincinnati, I must admit that my motivation was precisely nil and I spent much of the time worrying about how I was going to make it. My wife and I had moved away from Indiana once (before the kids) and it really didn't work out very well. Trying to imagine moving with the kids was almost more than I could comprehend.
Thus, the despair set in. That took a few days.
And then I got to talk to my friend Phil again. He reminded me of something I had noticed before. Not that he said anything, because he didn't have to. It's just the way he and his wife Christy live their lives. They live in hope. See, Phil and Christy have 3 beautiful girls but they have had some real problems having a 4th child. Lots of miscarriages. Lots of dashed hopes as one child after another was lost before they ever got to see him or her. Yet, for a reason I couldn't understand, they kept trying. And trying. And every time they laid their hearts out to the Lord and each time another piece was cut out before being returned to them. How could they be so masochistic about it? How could they keep doing this to themselves?
And then, after they got pregnant yet again (Christy's in her 32nd week or so now and we're all praying like crazy), the Lord opened my eyes to the gift of hope.
Now, let's back up for a sec. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul is expounding on his quite famous lecture on love. This is the passage that gets read at almost every Christian wedding to which I've been. You know the one, "Love is patient, love is kind, etc etc." But at the very end, Paul makes this statement: "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."
Fair enough. The greatest of these is love. And the whole Bible is one huge, overwhelming message of love. And the Bible is one example after another about people of faith who mirror a God of faith. As Christians, we have no problem grasping that without love we are false and without faith we are lost. We may not successfully live these things every day, but intellectually we "get it."
So why have we ignored hope? What is hope, anyway? Hope is the optimistic longing we have that we will receive something we want. Please note the 2 key words there: optimistic and want. So what happens when we don't get it? We are disappointed. We pray and put our hope in our prayers and then we don't see our prayers answered (which doesn't mean they weren't, of course) and our faith is shaken. But we get over it and the Bible strengthens us to never stop loving and to "keep the faith." So we love some more even though it might hurt and we are faithful even when it seems the world around us is not. But the hope starts to die. We forget that hope must also be strengthened and renewed.
Why?
Because our Christian teachings have drilled it into us that love is an end, not just a means. Loving is good because it is loving, not because loving gets us what we want. Faith is an end, not just a means. Faith is the openness to Christ's saving love and faith is good because it is faith, not because faith gets us what we want. And hope? Err.... And here is the problem. We still see hope strictly as a means, an optimistic means of getting what we want. It rarely, if ever, occurs to us that hope is an end too. There is blessing in hope. Not because hope gets us closer to something else, but because hope is so intertwined with love and faith that the separation is quite impossible. Love without hope is just resignation. Faith without hope is just a lie. Hope has to be there too because hope is the thing that lends the optimism to the equation. Hope means that we trust that God knows what he is doing.
So, here I am now facing unemployment. But I'm fairly young and I have some decent skills and my family is strong. So I throw the updated resume out onto monster.com and dice.com because I have an optimistic desire that the Lord will find me something else that will bless me even more than I'm blessed now. So what happens when this job disappears, the severance is gone, and the savings are depleted? I don't know. But hopefully I'll remember that even though my hopes weren't actualized that I was blessed anyway because I had hope.
Just like Phil and Christy. And their hope is named Anna.
