Simply A Night Owl

“What God has in mind when He tells us to keep hoping may not be what we usually mean when we think of hope. We wish for things to get better; we want to feel what we want to feel. Those are our dreams. But that kind of hope is for later. For now, in this life, the Bible offers a different kind of hope, a kind that at first we don’t find attractive or even hopeful.” ~ Larry Crabb

Crabb titled the third chapter in this book “Jesus Speaks”. I’ll get to that later. Crabb highlights the struggles and eventual triumph of Naomi as a prime example of maintaining hope but also makes reference to Hebrews 11.  It is there that I want to begin my discussion.

I once wrote a sermon for a baby blessing that made a reference to another sermon that I heard about Hebrews 11.  In this sermon, the pastor called the chapter the “Bible’s Hall of Fame of the Faithful”.   There is absolutely no doubt that when people think of those in history who have been faithful, they think of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Rahab; just to name a few.   There’s a few folks that are on the bottom of the list that are not so well known and they’re the ones I like best.   People like Gideon and Samson are the ones that I identify with the most.  They were fed to the lions, thrown into the fire and did battle most of their lives.  They were tortured, jeered, flogged, stoned, sawed in two or simply chained and put into prison.  They went through life poor and destitute, mistreated and persecuted.  They did nothing but wander from place to place simply looking for a place to live.  They were not worthy.   One might even say that their lives totally sucked.  I’m fairly certain that they also asked God if there wasn’t a little something that He could do about their circumstances but He was silent on the matter.  Yet they are still listed in the Hall of Fame.

Crabb refers to the the night before Jesus knew that he would be beat, maimed, tortured and killed in the most cruel way imagineable.   Jesus tells his disciples, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation” but what he was really saying was “keep the faith” or perhaps “don’t lose hope”.   Jesus knew that in the next twenty four hours, everything that his disciples knew was going to be turned upside down and inside out.  The person that they knew as God was going to turn himself over to angry mob intent on killing him.  You see Jesus knew then the same thing that he knows now and his twelve disciples were not much different than “Christians” of today.  When things are good and things are going their way, it’s all exciting and fresh and Jesus is the center of attention; all they would or for that matter, we can talk about.   The problem arises when shit hits the fan.  I think that it’s human nature to turn inward and focus on the issues or problems instead of remaining hopeful and faithful that in the end, everything works itself out.   The disciples certainly turned away from Jesus and lost hope.   Christians today do the same thing.  Even Crabb says this  in his book on page 40:

One gets the impression from reading Hebrews 11 that God would prefer to hear someone share, “My cancer came back, I just lost my job and my wife filed for divorce; I feel angry, discouraged and miserable…”

How the hell can anybody be encouraged over that?

Crabb finishes out by saying, “I intend to keep trusting God, I believe I can do it.  I want him more now than ever.”   The same as Jesus tells us to keep the faith and remain hopeful; “Watch and pray thay you do not fall into temptation”.  I left that out intentionally because it was the part that I quoted here that is going to be heard and more importantly, understood by a person who is seeing God and how He is interacting with them when their entire world is falling apart around them.

Be hopeful?  Is the premise of this book to let us know that our hope rests in being with the Lord in Heaven and that in the mean time, we just need to deal with this shit?   Try telling that to the mother whose teenage son is killed by a drunk driver the first night after he gets his driver’s license.   Try telling that to the emergency responders who investigate this gruesome crash and now have to not only carry around those images for the rest of their life but also have to try to not let it affect their lives.  Try telling that to the daughter of an Alzheimer’s patient whose father doesn’t even know who she is anymore.   Try telling that to the mother and father of a newborn who dies one night while sleeping and for absolutely no reason at all.

Yet we go on; one day to the next knowing full well that what we mostly hear from God is silence and what we will experience from Him is inactivity.