By Christine Warner, Director of the Matthew 25 Initiative
I was recently interviewed on the C4SO Podcast about my own personal life-altering traumatic event. Two years ago I was hit by a truck while putting gas in my car, miraculously lived, and sustained significant multi-trauma injuries. Though most of the conversation was about hope in the midst of the crisis, it got me thinking about how I am still called upon to hope in gritty, tangible, everyday ways. Hope is not, for me, an abstract theological concept; it has callouses and the salt of tears.
We are now in Lenten space while looking to resurrection life. The past 12 months feel like an endless Lent for many of us. Here in Texas, as you are probably aware, Lent arrived en force with a devastating winter storm. Loss and disorientation hit almost the entire state, and now we repair in the rubble, figuratively as well as literally.
The Lenten yearning for all shalom—light triumphing over darkness—and the Advent ache of waiting are both profoundly tied to hope. My path of fighting, often grasping, for hope the past two years has felt fragile, dimmed, and at times utterly lost. My teachers and heroes are others who live with various disabilities, chronic pain, and long-standing effects of trauma.
Hope, I now know, is very dusty, very practical, very conditional: “If I hope, then….” If I have hope of another reality, then I will choose courage, choose persistence, often choose pain or discomfort; because “for the hope set before him…” our heart-capturing Jesus walked through the horror of the cross for the greatest climax of the plot: his creation restored, healed, made new.
All our vulnerabilities and grief can be held with hope if resting in a story that will have that kind of an end. We wait. We contend. We wait. We get glimpses. We wait. We get tastes. We wait. But it’s a-comin’! Jesus, and the shalom he brings, is a-comin’!
How do I live into hope? I have to ask this every day, several times a day. As I live with ongoing loss and frailty, and as I scoot my chair near the hearth of God’s ways in the most broken places of our communities (my Matthew 25 Initiative people), here is where I land today…
My 9 Gritty, Practical Ways to Live Into Hope
1. It’s either all true or it’s all bunk. I place my wager on The Story being true. That God’s got it. He is mending, healing, working behind our backs, giving us tastes and glimpses. My job is to be attentive and responsive. In my greatest place of pain after being hit by that truck and for a while having no pulse or breath, I experienced him as truer than true, realer than real; his love is that ocean deep of the hymn. So there is no halfway about it. I’m all in and ready if my damaged carotid artery decides it’s done. His shalom is my story.
2. When all is tumbling and darkness feels greater than the light, I start with my body. Present to it, caring for it, placing it in God’s good “biosphere” to be strengthened: sleep, movement, nourishing food, breathing. Sometimes even the basics are hard, but the clarity of the starting point of my body orients me.
3. Soak in the Scripture story. I need that Shalom Story to fill my imagination. I read it as story. Come at it slant. Let it hit me afresh with its wonder, weirdness, provocative subversiveness, messy characters, power, plot twists, and frequent simplicity. Intriguingly, I can’t seem to leave Isaiah since I was able to read again two years ago. My senses will be healed on the day of that feast of fine wine and meats in the 25th chapter.
4. Name lament. He collects my tears and holds my anger and confusion. Some days, that is all that happens. The pain of physical therapy exercises, or a brain that is still mending from getting smashed, or a body that is still broken, or losses and grief that might not be restored on this side of his “a-comin’”… some days lament is all that happens, and I go to bed as the day closes, wondering if new mercies will come in the morning. Even sleep can be an act of hope.
5. Name celebration and gratitude. Paper and pencil, calling it out, repeating it to myself and others. I never graduate from this practice. I return often to these words of my professor, J.I. Packer, “Gratitude primes the pump of joy.” The embers of hope glow a little brighter most times.
6. Choose play, laughter. It’s prophetic work. As I hold all the suffering that could crush, I declare that it doesn’t have the last word. So, anyone who knows me knows, I love me a good dance party.
7. Seek beauty. Creation beauty and humanly crafted beauty. It pulls me into The Story. Did you know a butterfly looks dead when it comes out of the chrysalis? But within hours, its wings have dried and it has mastered the art of flying.
8. Keep giving community and relationship a chance. The relational part of the kingdom of God isn’t optional in a Trinitarian worldview. It’s the ecosystem of our life in Christ. Bridge-build, forgive, keep boundaries, sacrifice, love, cultivate humility. Yes, the Bride of Christ is messy. Yes, when the Church operates like God designed, she is gorgeous.
9. Pull up a chair to the hearth of Isaiah 58 and Matthew 25 (and through all the Bible for that matter). I come near the broken places. Seek where God is afoot, turning ashes to beauty. It’s his favorite place to be, and he promised to be there, with the hungry, those without homes, the at-risk children and youth, the physically vulnerable, the stranger/foreigner, those fighting addiction and seeking recovery, the vulnerable families, the marginalized, the imprisoned and detained, those with intellectual and physical disabilities, the poor…. “the least of these.” Apparently, it is where he likes to hang out and where the shalom of the Jesus kingdom is revealed.
The past 12 months have buffeted us with waves of loss and disorientation, many Good Fridays without Easter Sundays, an Advent-waiting ache with no Christmas. My two-plus years have been much of the same. All of life yearning unto hope, gritty practical, ordinary daily hope. I believe shalom will come. This I also believe and have learned in this suffering: His shalom is glory dusted all over the place if we have but eyes to see.
Listen to Christine’s interview on the C4SO Podcast.
Read Christianity Today‘s article referencing the Matthew 25 Initiative and the winter storm crisis in Texas. Please keep the vulnerable, marginalized, and under-resourced of Texas in your prayers.