Chaplain's Corner

It was a winter’s afternoon, just before Christmas. I was with a family who had been in a battle against a disease that was threatening to take their Mom’s life. It happened after a conversation with the doctor, the news was not good, and the doctor did a masterful and compassionate job of sharing the medical realities with the family. Visiting shortly after and talking with them about what they had just heard I witnessed it firsthand – hope slipped away.

Hope slipped away. Hope is the belief that something good is right around the corner. This family’s hope had been hanging on the results of a recent CT scan. They had prayed, asked their church families to pray, they were trusting God for the best case scenario for Mom and had prayed hard against the worst case that the doctor had spoken to them about a few weeks earlier; but the news was of the worst.

Hope slipped away. Mom was going to die, short of an absolute miracle; Mom would not live to see the summer of 2016. She would be kept comfortable, the doctor said she wouldn’t suffer much, that the nature of her condition generally resulted in growing weakness and that most simply slipped away quietly.

Hope slipped away. Mom wouldn’t see her oldest granddaughter walk down the aisle in August, she would never know the joy of holding her first grandchild, and there would never again be a happy meal around her table in the kitchen on the farm where she had raised her children and where so many wonderful family gatherings had been hosted.

What was this hope that had slipped away? It was a hope focused on this world, on this life, on more of the wonderful family love that had been so much a part of this family’s life. It was a hope tied to the here and now, a hope that was not able to look beyond the veil we know as death. For some families, that is the only hope they have. Despite a recent poll that stated that 72% of Canadian’s still believe in a god, for many that “belief” does not give them hope beyond this world.

Part of the reason is that many that ascent to a god’s existence, have little idea what or who “god” is, what “god” does and how one relates to “god”. The idea of a nameless, formless, cosmic possibility is not comforting. Many who contend that they believe in “a god” derive no hope whatsoever in this belief. Hope beyond this temporal existence doesn’t exist for many folks.

Hope slips away when our faith in “a god” is a nebulous, unspecified, impersonal concept. This hope is not the reality for people that believe in the God who claims to be the one and only. It is a bold claim to make for sure and those who believe the claim have to accept it purely by faith, but when they do, they receive a hope that is timeless, not bound by earthly circumstances or earthly existence, it is a hope that reaches beyond this material and temporal experience we call life, a hope anchored in eternity.

But the hope that will not slip away is a powerful thing. I have watched it embolden young and old in the face of death. The bible calls it the hope that does not disappoint. That’s the kind of hope I have come to know, that has carried me through many troubling days. It can be yours as well, it can carry you through whatever difficulties you face now or in the future. But we need to do more than believe in the existence of “a god”; we need to trust without reservation in the only true God who has existed always and who loves us.