The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

I want to talk about Hope.  In spite of being a “People Pleasing Non-conformist” I have always  loved the lure of HOPE,” and have been an adamant proponent of the gift and promise of HOPE.  I once noticed in writing a sermon that I could not even write the word without capitalizing it. The very concept of HOPE was like an emotional surge into my soul.  However, as life would have it, I expressed that observation before events and circumstances truly challenged my need for hope. 

Up until then, like everyone else, I had experienced some challenges, lived through a few traumas and had to acknowledge some personal truths.  But by-in-large, life had been manageable. Then, during one season, things began to unravel, and I had to relook at my very culturally shallow understanding of Hope.  

A 4^th of July cloudburst on a hot mountain road caused our seventeen-year-old daughter to hydroplane her car head-on into a family of five. Thanks be to God, there were no life-threatening injuries, but that did not keep the injuries from being life-altering 

Because it was a slow news cycle, it made it onto the front page of the local and regional newspaper for two days. The other family sued us, and our insurance was canceled. As our insurance agent told us at the time, the expense of the accident cost him his annual bonus. 

My daughter, who is one of the smartest and most talented young women I know, struggled with the aftermath of the automobile accident.  As challenging as the actual accident was, the changes that it caused in her life were a constant reminder of the event.  She crushed her ankle and broke several other bones. But the thing that challenges her even today was the head injury that impacted her short-term memory and her ability to handle stress. She was a music major, a dancer and a math whiz but her injuries changed all those gifts forever. She could not memorize music for music juries, she could hardly walk, much less dance and her ability to process math easily was no longer feasible.  Add to all of that internal upheaval the universities’, administrations’ and professors’ unwillingness to acknowledge the changes as anything but a flaw or a lack of effort on her part and it was a dark time as she tried to navigate this new reality.  

Fortunately, a good friend led us to a wonderful psychologist who helped her begin the journey toward wellness, but her diagnosis made it clear that these issues were going to have an ongoing impact and that there was no going back to the person she had been before. There was only forward, creating a new path with new dreams and a new reality. It was incredibly daunting and required a whole dismantling of hopes and dreams and reassembly of new ones. All our worlds had shifted and my thoughts about hope seemed to be written only in small case letters. 

The day she came home with the final diagnosis from the psychologist, we all began to process and strategize how to proceed. A sleepless night of grappling with that reality provided little hope. As I lay in a fetal position trying to imagine  how to get out of bed and move forward, a former student called me. Before I was able to get up, he began to unleash his frustration with me about some advice I had given him had ruined his life. May I say, I only pointed out some problems with his situation; I had no power to change his circumstances. In addition, when he made his decision, I put effort into finding a new place for him to serve, but it did not happen as quickly or as effortlessly as most things had happened in his life. All he could see was the loss of status and for him that translated as failure. There was nothing I could say that would help him see into the unknown and to be real honest, the effort was not in my wheelhouse that morning. It was a collision of hopelessness in both of our lives. 

When the call was over, I crawled out of the bed and made it into the shower, so that I could weep as long and as loudly as the water held out. In that space and time, I began to rethink Hope. 

The hope I was accustomed to claiming was not the HOPE of the Old or New Testament. It was the shallow hope of my culture. It was incremental, it was small and was easily uprooted. It was more like the running cedar that grows on the floor of our piney Carolina forest, than the cedar trees with roots that can sustain years of drought and floods with amazing resilience. While running cedar has the appearance of other evergreens, it is much more fragile. If you bend down and get a hold and tug on it just a little, you can rip up the whole root system and gather several feet of the greenery.  No tool or real effort is required. That is how I felt about my sense of hope. It looked like the real thing, but its roots were shallow, and it could be ripped up with little effort.  I do not think that is true of the Hope of Abraham, or the “Marys ,“ or the disciples left at the foot of the cross. I needed to find a deeper Hope.  One that would sustain me not just through the times of light and joy, but through the darkness and despair. 

Out of that came an new understanding of hope for my daughter, my former student and my own shaken faith. I wanted to write hope with capital letters again. 

So I thought about what the world said Hope was and what the Bible modeled it to be and this is what I found for myself.  I needed to reframe it to be something deeper and more resilient than our shallow cultural understanding.  I had a pastor friend describe someone that he liked but understood their limitations as someone “who was so shallow they wouldn’t splash.”  That is what I think of when I think of cultural hope. In contrast to the HOPE of the Old and New Testament, it is much more a wish than a hope.  

A new image of HOPE began to emerge for me and like the stages of grief, they do not have to happen in order, nor are they “one and done” events they are a journey of faith that helps us lean into and away from the most anticipated and yet sometimes equally painful events of our life. 

I began to imagine them as stages or seasons. There is Euphoric Hope, followed closely  by Disappointing Hope, the exhausting and frustrating Labor of Hope and the breakthrough to Authentic Hope. 

Our cultural hope resides primarily in the exuberant stage, Euphoric Hope. The kind of hope that makes your heart soar and your eyes see perfection.  Think of all of the times that we say we hope.  They are so often lower case hopes.  They are often rooted in things rather than others. They are transactional and fraught with unrealistic expectations.  They are events like new love, weddings, babies, a new car, the perfect college acceptance. They are important events. Euphoric Hope motivates us, keeps us dreaming and reaching, but it does not sustain us. It sets us up for disappointment that seems like the opposite of Hope, but it simply part of it. 

Tight on the heels of Euphoric Hope is Disappointing Hope.  That precious baby cries, the perfect spouse annoys, the prestigious school has challenging exams and student loans and the luxury car needs maintenance, just like your old one did. Life is a series of less than you hoped for experiences, but the Hope with roots, sees through those disappointments for opportunities to laugh and reframe the situation and that is the Labor of Hope. 

The Labor of Hope is where the framework for the real-life Hope happens.  It is the ability to be in the moment that has disappointed you or even devastated you and know there is something beyond the moment. It is living in the tension of what you thought life was going to be and know there are possibilities of what it can be. It is building a framework within ourselves and between each other that allows us to gamble on tomorrow. It is the day you decide to get up and put one foot in front of the other even, when you still want to stay in bed. I always think of Mark 9:23 when the father wants his son to be healed from a life-long illness and Jesus says, “everything is possible for those who believe” to which the boy’s father says, “I do believe, help my unbelief.” It is that HOPE that gives me the courage to “help my unbelief.” 

[I want to make it very clear that I am not talking about people who suffer from diagnosable mental health disorders when I speak of the Labor of Hope as a choice. That is a whole other conversation. I would NEVER want to add more guilt, stress and shame to someone who already struggles continuously with a sense of despair and breathlessness. I am talking about people who have a situational crisis that needs to be reframed and rethought about how to proceed.] 

The culmination of Euphoric Hope, Disappointing Hope and Labor of Hope is Authentic Hope. 

It is the reality that HOPE is deeper and greater than a wish. It is the acknowledgment that there is a Season of HOPE that is not what you expected. There is an underbelly to Euphoric HOPE that gives insight, strength and depth to the reality of Hope. HOPE is a journey. It is not just something that is bestowed, it is something that requires effort and strength and yes courage. It is not always cyclical; it is often untidy, complex and sometimes painful. But if allowed to take a foothold in your life, it provides a light in the darkness, a path through the weeds and rocks and a rope tied to the other side when you cannot imagine how to even move forward. It takes time and courage to understand the HOPE of Abraham and the HOPE of the Cross, but I would not want to live without HOPE.