Mourning with Aurora, Colorado

This morning I woke up with the rest of the country to learn about the horror of the theatre shooting massacre in Aurora, Colorado. My heart breaks for the family and friends who have been devastated by the loss of loved ones. It’s in these moments of deep anguish and evil that I’m at a loss for words. There are no words that can comfort. Nothing I say or write can diminish the hurt or remove the intense emotions and questions that come in the wake of such tragedy.

I, like many, want to step in and help. I want to offer hope and strength. Yet I struggle to know how to do this knowing that in times like this help often feels trite and hope meaningless. What can I do? What can we do?

I remember a time a few years ago when I was studying the difficult topic of the problem of evil in Oxford. The day we happened to begin dealing with this subject was also the day that evil and injustice hit very close to home. It overwhelmed me to the point of breaking.  I burst in to tears in the middle of the lecture, ran out, and spent the next hour locked in the bathroom sobbing.  In my pain I had so many questions with unsatisfactory answers.

When the lecture ended, my tutor and a close friend came and found me. They sat with me and let me know it was ok to be broken. They didn’t try to fix me or give me answers to take away the pain. They simply loved me. They sat with me in silence, letting me talk when I was ready. They cried and prayed with me, sharing in my grief. And it was in that moment that God came near. He had been there all along, but through these two friends he clearly showed himself to me. He loved me through them. When life’s pain caused me to question the goodness of God, he demonstrated his love for me in the comfort they offered by their presence. They were a tangible demonstration that the Man of Sorrows had not abandoned me as I walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Through them God reminded me that healing is possible through Jesus, the one who was broken so that I could be made whole.

Today and in the days ahead the people of Aurora will need tangible demonstrations that hope is not meaningless. They will need us to cling to hope for them. Whether we know them or not, let us sit with them, cry with them, pray for them, and allow God’s love to pour out through us. The hurt and pain will not go away. Yet Jesus, who is acquainted with grief, offers strength and hope in the midst of sorrow. And for those who trust in him, he promises that one day he will wipe away every tear and replace every sorrow with joy. He sits with the hurting in Aurora. He weeps with them, just as we do.

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Four Letter Words: Hope

“It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are.”[1]

So says C.S. Lewis in his less known, yet brilliant, work Studies in Words. This statement has captured my attention and imagination these past days.  I have this mental image of people spitting out words like bullets with no particular care about what they are saying or who they hit. Words, whether spoken or written, have the potential to wound like bullets or refresh like water on the parched soil of our souls.

This concept of words bringing a curse or a blessing has led me to contemplate the power of four letter words. But I’m not thinking of the four letter curse words that are most likely popping into your head at the moment. I’m not referring to the ones that are so flippantly spoken in everyday life, being the dominant vocabulary of movies, television, and music. I’m thinking of other four letter words which also have immense power to harm or heal. I’m thinking of words like hope, love, wait, and faith (I know that’s a 5 letter word, but it applies to this thought). These have become four letter words to me because while they are words meant to offer blessing, when used flippantly or at the wrong time they can feel like a curse. For example, for anyone who longs for marriage or parenthood, the often made comment of “Just wait on God’s timing,” while true, often rings hollow and does little to encourage in the midst of the wounds of longing. Or for the person going through deep suffering, to tell them to “not give up hope” or “You need more faith” may as well be like telling them to fly to the moon. It’s impossible.

This past week I’ve been immersed in conversations surrounding the four letter word Hope. We use it so haphazardly. We hope we make our flight on time. We hope traffic is light. We hope our favorite sports team beats their rival. And in the same breath we hope our loved one survives cancer. We hope we don’t lose our job in a struggling economy, or that we find a job. We hope our children grow up with strong character. We hope tomorrow is better than today. We hope we’re not wasting our life. We hope that whatever we are placing our faith in doesn’t fail us in the end.

So often we use the word hope and we mean nothing more than wishful thinking. It’s a word we use to communicate uncertainty and wish about the future. And when our hope shatters, we have no idea what to do or where to turn.

Into this concept of hope as wishful thinking, the Christian understanding of hope invades our hopelessness, shining brightly in what is often a very dark world. The Christian understanding of hope begins with an acknowledgement that the world is not the safe and good place we long for (which I think we can all agree on).  It does not ignore our pain. It confronts our pain at its very foundation of our own brokenness and inability to right what is wrong in our world and in us. It assures us that we can, with confident expectancy, look forward to the day when right-ness will replace all that is wrong and every tear wiped from the eyes of those who have looked to Jesus to mend what only He can fix.

Andy Bannister of RZIM Canada recently made this point so well. The Christian hope finds its stability in God’s reality and character. He is the only ground for, basis of, and object of true hope. Because its hope based upon the Person of God and knowing Him, the reasons for hope are as far from wishful thinking as one can get. [2] The uniqueness of this hope is that its founded on something outside of us and our world. All other worldviews look either within or without in the search for a better tomorrow. Only Christianity looks upward, acknowledging that there is nothing within us or in our world that can fix the darkness we live in.

As the Apostle Paul said, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Yet the message of Christian hope doesn’t end here, because “in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

Because of Christ, this four letter word of hope speaks a blessing and not a curse. We may use it carelessly, but the message of confident expectancy it communicates is anything but flippant.

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[1] C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, Cambridge University Press, 1961,  p. 6.

[2] Notes from Andy Bannister’s talk, “Hope and Thinking,” at the RZIM Summer Institute, June 13, 2012. http://stayintheconversation.org/rzimcanada/