Hope

In the last week, a family friend has been hospitalized with an aneurysm and is in a coma as I type this. Two dear friends from church have found out that the cancers they have been battling are back with a vengeance, and the (only 31 year-old) husband of a sweet friend is facing open heart surgery this summer. I won't lie. It's been a lot to take in. While none of these are happening in my immediate family, they are all people who are in my immediate sphere of life. These are the kinds of crises that we generally experience sporadically in life. For all of these things to happen in one week has brought me to my knees, metaphorically and literally.

God is good, All the time. All the time, God is good. Do I believe this? Do those facing these challenges believe this, or is it something we say?

I recently was witness to a true, honest to goodness miracle. The old-fashioned kind. The kind that can not be explained by anyone or anything other than supernatural power. A very young girl at our church faced a health crisis, and the doctors gave her little-to-no chance of survival. At the very least they were certain she would need a new heart. You can read the story here. That little girl is alive and well. I see her running around at church every Sunday. Nothing the doctors did "fixed" her. They simply kept her alive while God healed her. Period. He healed her.

So what about my friends facing health challenges now? Is God only good if He works the same kind of miracle for them that He did for Alisa? And what if He hadn't healed Alisa? Would that mean He wasn't good?

In all honesty, I don't struggle with the answer to that question. I get His sovereignty. I struggle with a lot of things in my walk with the Lord, but I understand that His perspective is eternal and ours is temporal. I get it.

My struggle is for those who don't get it. Those who have no hope. As I pray for these friends of mine going through the drama of life, I wonder how people do it who don't have hope. Not hope for healing. God is certainly still in the miracle business and is capable of healing, but that's not what we hope in. We have hope in the fact that this world is not all there is. If God decides to allow my friends to succumb to the sicknesses plaguing them, we can rest in the fact that we will see them again some day. We can celebrate that they are getting to see Jesus face-to-face, which, quite frankly, makes me a little jealous. We have hope.

So how do we share that hope? How do we make sure that those whose bodies are failing them can know that they can have a better, perfect body for all of eternity? How can we make sure that those who have been failed by our superficial, limited version of love know that they can experience perfect love for all eternity? How can we make sure that those who are looking for a God who moves mountains knows that the greatest miracles He performs are the ones where He transforms our hearts?

I think the best answer to that question is to make sure that we actually believe those things ourselves, not just say we do. The hope we have available to us is so vital, we need to make sure that we are resting in it ourselves. So much so that it becomes contagious. Because in a world that is suffering, physically and emotionally, nothing is more contagious than hope.