When All Hope Is Gone

Increasingly I find myself interested in people who found ways to tap into hope when the circumstances around them offered no hope. Yesterday I spent over an hour visiting with a man who earlier this year was released from prison after 27 years behind bars. In many ways his story is a story of hope shattered, by his own doing and by the doing of those around him. He was a successful high school athlete and student, and a respected teacher. In spite of this, he gravitated into drug use and eventually into drug dealing. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He received no hope of freedom from the consequences he created, freedom from dirty deeds done to him, or freedom from a lifetime of despair. Despair was a constant parasite on his existence. Yet he tapped into a source of focus and hope that kept him going and hoping for deliverance, when every avenue of hope was closed off. By a legal anomaly he walked away from prison a free man earlier this year at the age of 62, with almost half his life taken away by his own mistakes and the mistakes of others. And yet he is not bitter. Quite the contrary, he is a man of uncommon faith and uncommon trust in God and the future.

Many people I know who have never and will never spend time in prison long for the freedom of heart, the forgiving and forgiven spirit, and the exuberance of living he has. I want people in our worshipping fellowship to hear his story.

To often we tie hope to circumstances. If things are good, then we have hope. If things are not good, we yield to anger, bitterness, blame, and despair. Maybe hope is really hope only when we cling to it regardless of the circumstances.

How would you feel if your best friends abandoned you? What if one of them set you up for a fall? When given a chance, no one stepped up on your behalf. The world around you was willing to let you die and not think anything of it. That was Jesus' experience, as the spikes drove into his body to pin him to a cross. Nothing in the circumstances around him spoke of hope - quite the opposite! He came within a hair's breadth of despair. ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") Yet, in spite of it all, he chose hope. ("Into your hands I commend my spirit.")

Those are the people who catch my attention - relentless "hopers" when all hope is gone. I'll see you around the next bend in the river.