When you wake up to counterfeit hope

the monthly letter

There is something I prayed for with what I called fervor — but it may have been more like frenzy. Morning after dark morning, I walked a circular pattern, from the kitchen to the family room to the foyer, and around again, praying. Now, I am the only one who notices the wear on my floor because those steps weren’t merely counted. Had you asked me, I would have said I clung to hope on that hardwood pathway. Hope for a change. Hope for redemption. Hope for God to move. Hope for any way but the one I woke up to day after day for a year. God, please-anything-but-this hope.

But instead of getting what I prayed, His answer was that “thing” got harder. I didn’t see change, just more pain. Whether due to exhaustion, a lack of faith, or a sudden awakening to reality (probably all three), I slowly stopped praying for change.

My prayer changed instead.

And I wondered about hope. I put it on the shelf, not out of view — distant enough to consider and evaluate, but just not to hold onto anymore.

I suppose I could’ve said I lost my hope when I lost so much with this prayer that I placed in the void, but perhaps I was old enough to realize hope wasn’t lost; maybe it just wasn’t what I thought it was.

The hope I’d gripped within my palm those dark mornings of pacing the first floor of my home made me nervous in the grasping. Excitable. I combed through my days for minute signs to confirm my hope, and I felt irritated when I couldn’t find them. Upon re-reading my journals from that time, I see myself desperately fixated (when I would have called myself fixed) back then. It wasn’t such a good thing to watch the replay — I wasn’t the fiery, determined prayer warrior I imagined myself to be. I was mostly scared and borderline obsessed.

Bigger than hopes dashed, at the end of that time, my heart crashed; hence, there was no time to hold hope. I had to revive.

Sometime later, I started reading and re-reading and re-reading Romans 5:3-5. Mostly by accident, in the way we back ourselves into truth unexpectedly (proving that Someone is moving our heart more than our willpower), I kept bumping into these words from Paul.

“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

This hope Paul talked about seemed different from the hope I had while pacing my floor. It seemed like something had been done to me rather than through the inner mania I had funneled into prayer those years ago, with all the strength of myself. This hope (Paul’s hope) seemed passive, even. Easy.

Not ease by way of circumstances but ease by way of a work being produced in me rather than a work that, if I didn’t do it, wouldn’t be done. Those skittish morning-dark prayers felt like a desperate last-ditch effort. The hope I was beginning to taste, however (“coincidentally” during the same time I was reading these words in Romans), felt effortless. I woke up to it at times. It surprised me as I poured my morning tea, and I felt light despite all circumstances pointing in another direction. I fielded bad news, and instead of sunk, I was curious.

Looking at my circumstances, I shouldn’t have felt light, but something was happening inside of me that I couldn’t put words to, but that I was living. At times, I was seeing a horizon — a dawn — and not just dusk. Our dog got sick, and instead of assuming she would die (because we were in such a season of loss and … “why not her too?”… ), I expected good. I randomly experienced the “cheerful expectancy” Eugene Peterson describes in his paraphrase of Romans 12:12.

Like finally visiting the actual Eiffel Tower after you’d painstakingly built a LEGO model in your bedroom, it felt surreal.

Perhaps the title of this post should be, instead, replicas of hope versus real hope, as the hope I practiced while pacing the floor may not have been quite counterfeit. It was directed at God, but it was also frenzied. It was expectant, but also clingy. It brought me to Him, but also for an immediate answer. It was a type and a shadow of something much greater, of which I will see — much greater — five years from now and then again.

A replica.

But visiting the Eiffel Tower is nothing like constructing a model of it. Constructing that model is important and not to be dismissed as a mere illusion. But it is merely that — a model: a replica of the real thing.

And Romans 5 has a lot less to do with me mustering my strength to make something happen by way of fervent prayer and a lot more to do with something that happens to me when I …. (gulp) suffer.

Friends read that again.

When you suffer, God produces something. A whole lot of somethings. The kind of something that we sincerely want.

I’m living the relief of this, friends.

The story of our house is still unfolding. We’re back in middle America, but not in our home yet — there is just so much mold. Our “team” is still working tirelessly to remediate and rebuild the walls of our beloved home, but there is yet no known end date. And this is not to mention some private and profound losses also happening in our lives, that I won’t write about here, but would break the heart of any human.

However, I’m starting to have more and more (and more) brushes with this hope about which Paul speaks.

It doesn’t make sense. Given my history and my proclivity, I should doubt and dread.

But, as He does with you, God is working something in me when I’m barely working and on some days just surviving. And, oh my, that feels much lighter than when I pounded the pavement in prayer, certain that my shaky replica of hope needed it to float.

{As you can see from some of the links above, I have unpacked this more on SOAR. This summer, I am writing to this private, fenced-in space community about slow living and what it looks like to find Him, counter-culturally. Next week, I’m kicking off summer with the list of all that I read on my sabbatical. If you’re not yet subscribed, you can do so here. }

Until next month,

Sara