Hope Like Gingerbread
As for me, I will always have hope.
-Psalm 71:14
Three years ago, I had a dream that November of 2021 would be painful and hard. So when November rolled around this year, I braced for impact—just in case. What if Drew received a fatal diagnosis at his next checkup? What if a fire burned down my parents’ home. . .again? What if my grandparents passed away, and I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye?
When December arrived, I breathed a sigh of relief at narrowly missing the portended disaster and doom of the previous month. It has been easy to forget that I ever had that dream—until I went on a walk with Drew to go vote in our town’s gingerbread house contest.*
*Let it be known that this guy gets me out to vote, whether it’s for presidential candidates or gingerbread houses. I voted for “Gingerbread Log Cabin,” lovingly crafted by a grandmother-granddaughter duo.
The point is, walks help me process. And as I left the gingerbread houses, it occurred to me that November 2021 was actually quite hard. But the truth is,
I have become so accustomed to “painful and hard” over the past three years that November 2021 didn’t even phase me.
Yet as of this November,
We are still in a global pandemic.
The future still feels tenuous and uncertain.
My loved ones are still suffering in ways I cannot comprehend or explain.
There are still unanswered questions, hopes, and longings that keep me awake at night.
I still struggle daily with anxiety and depression.
And last but not least, evil (no respecter of germs) has not kept the recommended 6 feet of distance and continues to steal, kill, and destroy.
Oh, yeah. That.
Perhaps it is a good thing that my window of tolerance for personal and global suffering has been forcibly expanded by the events of the past two years. Sometimes it’s nice to feel a little numb to things that would have torn me open before.
But with infinite patience towards my spiritual lethargy, God has been upturning the resigned and defeated stones that have settled at the bottom of my heart since three Novembers ago. Each unturned stone reveals a question, often one that initially discomforts me. The most pressing question that has arisen recently is,
“When I numb myself to pain and uncertainty, do I also numb myself to hope?”
I used to be someone who burned brightly with dreams, hope, and longing. As a child, I told everyone I met that I was going to be a star and I truly believed it. But the disappointments of life have taught me to temper that dreaming with caution. My semi- reasonable inner adult voice warns me, “Proceed slowly and with great care, so you do not get hurt. Keep your hopes small and manageable so when they’re inevitably dashed, it’s no big deal.”
Numbness is a natural, self-protective response to the litany of surprising losses that have occurred over the past two years. Why would anyone want to continuously be caught off guard by making themselves vulnerable to pain? For me, this fearful, self-protecting mindset has been the spiritual equivalent of sleeping with one eye open—clinging tightly to blessings that may be snatched from me when I least expect it:
You married a man you love deeply? Yes, but he could still die in a car crash.
You have a home you enjoy and feel safe in? Yes, but it could still burn down.
You believe God answers prayer? Yes, but sometimes He doesn’t.
Sometimes He doesn’t—at least not in the ways we want or expect.
Unanswered questions hurt. Is it better not to ask them, choosing instead to numb ourselves with distractions or the sometimes-lie that we’re okay with things staying the way they are? Although I am tempted to answer, “Yes,” this pesky question persists:
When we numb ourselves to pain, do we also numb ourselves to hope?
Like pain, hope requires that we stay open and vulnerable for it to impact us. Just like pain, hope requires a deeper engagement with ourselves, God, and life’s deepest questions. But unlike pain, hope envisions something beyond the pressing weight of our earthly troubles. Hope asks us to look up, to dream bigger, further, higher than we could on our own—to allow the future reality of heaven to shape our present experiences of suffering.
I do not know what to do with the heaviness of unanswered questions that persist across the years. But I do know that I am no longer satisfied with keeping my hopes manageable and safe.
I want to dare to hope again—because if the past two years have taught me anything, it’s that a life without bold hope is no life at all.
With this truth in mind, perhaps the deeper question at stake is:
Do we have the courage to live each day with the vulnerability that hope requires?
*
I think the book of Lamentations has much to say in response to this question. Throughout Lamentations, the author voices the communal grief of the exiled Israelites who are mourning the loss of everything they once held dear: family, freedom, home, safety. The book opens with these words: “How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!”
Much of chapters one and two contain the authors’ crying out to God on behalf of his community about all that has been devastated by their enemies. But in chapter three, the author steps into the spotlight with a heartbreaking and uncomfortable display of vulnerability. He begins his monologue by acknowledging that the suffering isn’t just “out there;” it’s in his heart, too. He says,
I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath.
He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light;
indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long… (3:1-3)
These are the words of someone who has looked suffering in the face and called it what it is, allowing himself to experience the complexities of unrelenting pain. He continues,
I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is.
So I say, “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord.”
I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” (3:17-24)
Through his vulnerable and honest declaration, we see that acknowledging the loss of “all I had hoped from the LORD” is the catalyst for his remembering what is most important: the steadfast, immovable love of God. And it is this painful remembering that enables him to say, “Therefore I have hope.” Paradoxically, acknowledging his pain is an essential ingredient towards renewing his posture of hope.
When painful times come (or continue), will we choose anything that will dull the pain? Or will we allow the presence of pain to re-orient us towards hope?
*
While I was fulfilling my civic duty by contemplating rows of stale and crusty, meticulously and sloppily decorated gingerbread houses, the cynical part of me wondered, “Why am I here? And why did these people put so much work into a contest they have a very small chance of winning for a house they don’t even get to eat?”
And something deep within me answered, “Hope.”