Growing Toward Hope

I love stories--other people's stories--pretend or real-life. Many excellent minds have expressed the power of stories to win hearts, to enrich life, and to embody truths. Today, however, I sense that sometimes I misuse others' stories as a retreat from my own. Ideally, stories give us courage and wisdom to carry back into our daily experience. I've wrongly used them--particularly mediocre TV dramas--to get away from my story. Hiding from fears and shame over my flounderings, I watch pretend people do significant things. Even when they encounter difficulties, the plot and purposefulness of their stories creates a comforting world for me, the viewer. It is as if I trust the screen writers to create a good story more than I trust God to create something intrinsically worthwhile through the unfolding of my life.

Despite being of an age where I should be relatively established financially and socially, I lack a well-defined career path and am underemployed. The sad thing about this is that I haven't seriously pursued what I am trained for and love. I've been timid and afraid and procrastinated over and over again.  I am ashamed of these facts. Socially, I am not in much better condition. As a little girl, I thought the advantage of growing up was the chance to nurture one's own family. Now, not only am I not in a fair way to getting married, I begin to doubt I even want to be! I appear to have become a type of person of which I am ashamed: an "adultescent"--one who just won't quite exert herself into full-fledged adulthood.

If it is true that we have "besetting sins" or personally tenacious temptations, mine may be despair. I suppose few who know me are much aware of this. Then, again, they may have guessed. I fight the thing fairly often, not in one long and terrible battle, but through a lot of little skirmishes. You can't face this. You're doomed. You can't change. Remember how hard you tried before? Remember how you can't even seem to try hard anymore? it whispers. Give up. Come on. Just give up. 

The prelude to such reflections often involves a nagging panic, a great fear that my life will end up as one pitiful failure. The answer to this alarm may include less worrying about what I think and feel, and more doing what I have to do. But there's more to it than that. For one thing, action has become strangely hard for me. And for another, this time in my life is a chance to embrace faith in every step. Nothing comes easily right now, and the effort of my steps slows me down and offers me the choice to trust and to keep going.

Earlier this week, feeling unable to view my future accurately through a discoloration  of fears and shames and sadnesses, I decided to embark on a mini pilgrimage. I wished I could sob for a whole night and somehow wash the sadness out. Unfortunately, I can't cry on demand or for long durations. So, instead, I drove to Lake Michigan and stood knee deep in the water, throwing stones. I pictured in all that vast water the greatness of God's love surrounding me and stretching out of sight in front of me. Holding a pile of smooth rocks in one hand, I named each stone for one of my cares and flung it into the lake. The waves were so mild that day that I could see the circles from the disappeared stones spread over the bobbing water.

In the past few days since my visit to the lake, I have realized something. I have to throw those stones every day. The cares come back, and I can choose to hoard them or to throw them and myself back on the resources of God's love. I think it would be easier if only I could understand and resolve everything. I wish my feeble vocational attempts would turn up a bit of concrete encouragement. I wish things would go right when I try. But God holds the pen, and I pray that I (with His help) will embrace His story line--not just in trust for the future, but in trust for this moment.

In Romans 5, Paul says,

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 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. (v. 1-5, ESV)

Because of Christ, I am standing in grace--I am growing toward hope.