Keeping Hope Alive: Radical Courage in Desperate Times
“How do you keep hope alive these days?” the questioner asked. “It looks to me like everything is going to hell in a handbasket.”
The question sounded like a challenge. It wasn’t friendly curiosity, and it was full of cynicism. I felt like I was on trial. I couldn’t decide if she was shaming me or judging me, but it felt like it could be both.
I started to answer, but then she said, “I’m sure you don’t get ruffled, so don’t even bother to explain. I just don’t have your faith….or whatever it is you say you have.”
Good grief. A pack of presumptions laid on me before I could respond to either one!
I thought about that question yesterday morning when I was suddenly startled. I don’t mean that I was surprised or caught off-guard. I am talking about one of those sudden, out-of-the-blue happenings that leaves you short of breath and with your heart racing. In other words, the situation scared me to death.
Granted, it was over almost before I knew what was happening, and indeed, nothing was broken and no one was injured, except me, that is. I couldn’t catch my breath for a few seconds, and when I did, I began to cry — uncontrollably, the ugly cry, the shaking all over cry. And for several minutes, I cried like a baby. I think I could say that I was weeping — copiously. It was serious crying — from my gut.
As I began to calm myself, two thoughts raced to the front of my mind at the same time. I thought about how my inquisitor would judge me now. I guess she could have assumed that I was falling apart at the seams. If she had assumed that, she would have been wrong.
The second thought contained a picture of my dad in a hospital bed, following a stroke. Upon reading all of the possible things that might happen to him as he was undergoing a necessary procedure — as in another stroke, paralysis, death — he burst into tears. Mistakenly, the attending nurse chided him by saying, as if she was talking to a four-year-old, “Now, Dr. Ball, where’s your faith?” I jumped to attention, and so did my mother and sister. Was that a shaming tone we heard?
I’ll never forget how my dad — a strong friend of God, a man of long-standing faith, a retired 40-year pastor of a local church — took the pen from her hand, and signed the form and looked up at this stranger/nurse and said, “It will hold. It will hold.” He couldn’t see the form in that moment, but his voice was the strong voice I knew so well.