So in my last post I wrote a little bit about the
significance of hope and about our senseless tendency to outgrow it the way we outgrow nightlights
or stuffed animals (For the record, I’ve only outgrown one of these two.). I endorsed wild, childlike hope. Today I
write about setting that wild hope in the right place and about the dangers of setting
our hope in the wrong place.
Let me refer to my last post again. Remember how I said that
we’re programmed to hope? I think that everybody hopes in something. Notice I
did not say “hopes for something.”
You can hope for a short line at
Starbucks or for sunshine on your day off: you’ll either get your wish…or you
won’t. But you hope in Christ, in material possessions, in your relationship status,
etc. This hoping in (as opposed to
hoping for) is a part of your
identity; it dictates how you live. For example, if your hope is in
possessions, you live to acquire. If your hope is in Christ, you live to love.
If your hope is in your relationship status, you might live to be loved, or to
be independent and unattached (depending on the desired status), at all costs. Really, this world offers us an abundance of
places to set our hope. However, each of
these, but for Christ, is unsafe and only damages a childlike hope.
Bear with me for this illustration: Santa Claus. *Permission
to roll eyes granted* When I was small, my calendar year revolved around
Christmas Day and my sense of morality was grounded in the naughty and nice
lists. When I was told just days before my eighth Christmas that Santa was a
myth, that my loving parents were the ones responsible for the piles of
packages under the pine tree, I was rocked. I know this sounds melodramatic,
however at the time it seemed that my entire worldview had toppled. I remember
timidly sitting down on my mother’s side of the bed that evening and, with a
knot in my stomach and a voice softer than my usual, asking if it was true that
Santa was not real. In one short sentence, my hopes for Christmas morning were
gone. Oh I would still receive presents,
but the magic was no more. The excitement, the anticipation, the thrill had disappeared
with my mother’s truthful answer. I recall that particular Christmas morning
being tough. What was the point, after all? Yes, I got the doll house I’d
wanted. But I got it because my parents saw me circle it with a yellow
highlighter in the catalog and not because Santa Claus just knew.
It took me a couple
Santa-less Christmases before I could appreciate the holiday the way I had
before. As I grew older and learned more about why Christmas is really worth
celebrating, as my hopes shifted from Santa Claus to Immanuel, I became
convinced that the lie of Santa, the hollow hope I’d clung to, had been
damaging. It had shaken my faith in my parents firstly, but it had also left
some part of me wondering if any hope at all was safe. If Santa’s not real...what
else? Well turns out, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, for starters.
As I continued growing, I placed my hopes in other unsafe
places, like in the approval of boys. I repeatedly found my joy and my identity
in winning affirmation from the opposite sex. But like all false hopes, these
tumbled again and again. After each disappointing relationship I asked myself
the same question I’d asked as a young child: Is any hope safe? If his love
wasn’t real…what else? For a few years I was caught in a cycle: receiving and hoping
in affection from a boy, seeing this affection prove false or fleeting, then experiencing
deep disappointment…and then repeating it all out of desperate longing to see
hope win. I’d say it was only about a year and a half ago, if I’m being
perfectly honest, that I began to realize where my misplaced hopes really
belonged.
While I was studying abroad in Ireland in the spring of 2012,
one of my classmates had anonymously slipped a brief note into my mailbox. A
few encouraging words were scrawled across a piece of torn-out notebook paper
and the last lines read “keep seeking. Memorize- Romans 5:5.” I grabbed my Bible
and thumbed over the silvery pages until I found the passage, which read:
And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
There, sitting on the porch outside the kitchen door, gazing
up at those green hills tumbling into the Irish Sea, something changed for me.
A hope that doesn’t disappoint. The Holy Spirit whispered to me, “this is what
you’ve been looking for. Right here. This is it.” And there was joy of the
purest kind, the joy of a soul who is finally through playing hide and
seek. No more empty closets or bathtubs,
as she finds herself face to face with the One for whom she’s been searching. I
saw in a fresh way how silly I had been to place my hope, my identity in anyone
besides my loving Savior, the Redeemer of my soul. I smiled.
This is where we are to put our wild, childlike hope- in
Christ Jesus. When we place our hope in people or things other than Christ, we
will eventually know bitter disappointment. But when our hope is in Jesus, we
can face disappointing circumstances without being crushed. We can face ugly
situations without being destroyed. We can know joy deep in our souls in even
the grimmest of conditions, because we have a hope that does not disappoint.
